Conversation with Kevin Spacey

the following is a conversation with Kevin spacy a two-time Oscar winning actor who has starred in seven The Usual Suspects American Beauty and House of Cards he is one of the greatest actors ever creating haunting performances of characters who often embody the Dark Side of human nature 7 years ago he was cut from House of Cards and cancelled by Hollywood in the world when Anthony rap made an allegation that Kevin spacy sexually abused in 1986 Anthony rap then filed a civil lawsuit seeking $40 million in this trial and all civil and criminal trials that followed Kevin was acquitted he has never been found guilty nor liable in the court of law in this conversation Kevin makes clear what he did and what he didn&#39;t do I also encourage you to listen to Kevin&#39;s Dan Wooten and Allison Pearson interviews for additional details and responses to the allegations as an aside let me say that one of the principles I operate under for this podcast and in life is that I will talk with everyone with empathy and with backbone for each guest I hope to explore their life&#39;s work life&#39;s story and what and how they think and do so on honestly and fully The Good the Bad and the Ugly the Brilliance and the flaws I won&#39;t whitewash their sins but I won&#39;t reduce them to a worst possible caricature of their sins either the latter is what the mass hysteria of Internet mobs too often does often rushing to a final judgment before the facts are in I will try to do better than that to respect due process in service of the truth and I hope to have the courage to always think independently and to speak honestly from the heart even when the eyes of the outrage mob are on me again my goal is to understand human beings at their best and at their worst and hope is such understanding leads to more compassion and wisdom in the world I will make mistakes and when I do I will work hard to improve I love you all this is the Lex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here&#39;s Kevin spacy you played a serial killer in the movie 7 your performance was one of if not the greatest portrayal of a murderer on screen ever what was your process of becoming him John Doe the serial killer the truth is I didn&#39;t get the part um I had been in Los Angeles making a couple of films swimming of sharks and Usual Suspects and then I did a film called outbreak that Morgan Freeman was in and I went into audition for David Fincher in probably late November of 94 and I audition for this part and didn&#39;t get it and I went back to New York and I think they started shooting like December 12th and I&#39;m in New York I&#39;m back in my I have a wonderful apartment on West 12th Street and my mom has come to visit for Christmas and it&#39;s December 23rd and it&#39;s like 7:00 at night and my phone rings and it&#39;s Arnold son who&#39;s the producer of seven and he&#39;s very jovial and he&#39;s very friendly and he says how you doing and I said fine and he said listen do you remember that film you came in 47 I said yeah yeah absolutely he goes Well turns out that uh we hired an actor and we started shooting and then yesterday David fired him and David would like you to get on a plane on Sunday and come to Los Angeles and start shooting on Tuesday and I was like okay would it be imposing to say Can can I read it again because it&#39;s it&#39;s been a while now and I&#39;d like to so they send a script over I read the script that night I thought about it um and I I had this feeling I I I I I can&#39;t even quite describe it but I had this feeling that it would be really good if I didn&#39;t take billing in the film and the reason I felt that was because I knew that by the time this film would come out it would be the last one of the three movies that I just shot the fourth one and if any of those Films Broke through or did well if it was going to be Brad pit Morgan Freeman gwenth palro and Kevin spy and you don&#39;t show up for the first 25 30 40 minutes people going to figure out who you&#39;re playing so people should know that you are the serial you play the serial killer in the movie and serial killer shows up like more than halfway through the mie very late and when you say billing is like the posters the VHS cover everything you&#39;re gone you&#39;re not there not there and so new line Cinema uh told me to go fuck myself um that they absolutely could use my picture and my image and this became a little bit of a I&#39;d say 24hour conversation and it was Fincher who said I actually think this is a really cool idea so the compromise was I&#39;m the first credit at the end of the movie when the credits start so I got on a plane on that Sunday and I flew to Los Angeles and I went into where they were shooting and I went into the makeup room and David Fincher was there and we were talking about what should I do how should I how should I look and I just had my hair short for outbreak cuz I was playing a military uh character and I just looked at the hairdresser and I said do you have a razor and finer went are you kidding I said no he goes if you shave your head I&#39;ll shave mine so we both shaved our heads and then I started shooting the next day so my long-winded answer to your question is that I didn&#39;t have that much time to think about how to build that character what I think in the end Fincher was able to do so brilliantly with such Terror was to set the audience up to meet this character I think the the last scene the ending scene and the car ride leading up to it where it&#39;s mostly on you in conversation with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pit it&#39;s one of the greatest scenes in film history so people somehow didn&#39;t see the movie there&#39;s these five murders that happen that are inspired by five of the seven deadly sins and the the ending scene is inspired represents the last two deadly sins and there&#39;s this calm subtlety uh about you in your performance it&#39;s just terrifying maybe in contrast with Brad Pit performance that&#39;s also really strong but that the contrast in the contrast is the terrifying uh sense that you get in the audience that builds up to The Twist at the end or the surprise at the end with the famous what&#39;s in the box from Brad Pit right that is Brad Pitt&#39;s character&#39;s wife her head yeah I I I can really only tell you that while we were shooting that scene in the car while we were out in the in the desert in that place where all those electrical wires were David just kept saying less do less um and I just tried to I mean he I remember he kept saying to me remember you&#39;re in control like you&#39;re going to win and knowing that should allow you to have tremendous confidence and I just followed that lead and I I just think it&#39;s the kind of film that so many of the elements that had been at work from the beginning of the movie in terms of its style in terms of how he built this Terror in terms of how he built for the audience a sense of this person being one of the scariest people they might ever encounter um is it really allowed me to be able to not have to do that much just say the words and mean them and I think it also is it&#39;s an example of what makes tragedy so um difficult I mean you know very often tragedy is people operating without enough information they don&#39;t have all the facts Romy and Juliet they don&#39;t have all the facts they don&#39;t know what we know as an audience and so in the the end whether Brad Pitt&#39;s character ends up shooting John Doe or turning the gun on himself which was a discussion I mean there were there were a number of alternative endings that were discussed um nothing ends up being tied up in a nice little bow it is complicated and shows how nobody wins in the end when you&#39;re not operating with all the information when you say say the words and mean them what does mean them mean I&#39;ve uh I&#39;ve been very fortunate to be directed by Fincher a couple of times and um he would say to me sometimes I don&#39;t believe a thing that is coming out of your mouth shall we try it again and you go okay yeah we can try it again and sometimes he&#39;ll do take and then you&#39;ll look to see if he has any added um genius to to to hand you and he just goes let&#39;s do it again and then let&#39;s do it again and some sometimes I I I say this in all humility he&#39;s literally trying to beat the acting out of you and and and by continually saying do it again do it again do it again and not giving you any specifics he&#39;s he is he is systematically shredding you of all pretense of all you know cuz look very often you know actors we come in on the set and we&#39;ve thought about the scene and we&#39;ve worked out you know I&#39;ve got this prop and I&#39;m going to do this thing with a can I&#39;m you know all these thing all the tea I&#39;m going to do a thing with the thing that and and David is the kind of director where he just wants you to stop adding all that crap and just say the words and say them quickly and mean them and it takes a while to get to that place I I&#39;ll tell you a story this is a story I just love because it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s in the exactly the same wheelhouse so Jack lemon&#39;s first movie was a film called it should happen to you and was directed by George cuer and Jack tells this story and it was just an incredibly Charming story to hear Jack tell he said so I I I&#39;m doing his picture and let me tell you I this is a terrific part for me and I&#39;m doing a scene it&#39;s on my first day it&#39;s my first day and it&#39;s a terrific scene and he goes we we do the first take and and and George cuer comes up to me and he says Jack I said yeah he said could you do let&#39;s do another one but just do a little less uh in in this one and Jack said a little a little less a little less than what I just did he said yeah just a little less so he goes we do another take and and I think boy that was it I mean let&#39;s let&#39;s just go home and uh cuer walked up to it and said Jack i&#39; let&#39;s do another one this time just a little bit less and Jack said let less than what I just did now he said yeah just a little bit less he goes oh okay so he did another take and cuer came up and he said Jack just a little bit less and Jack said a little less than what I just did he said yes he go well if I do any less I&#39;m not going to be acting and cuer said exactly Jack exactly I mean I guess what you&#39;re saying is it&#39;s extremely difficult to get to the the bottom of a little less because the power if we just stick even on seven of your performance is in the tiniest of subtleties like when you say oh you didn&#39;t know and you turn your head a little bit and a little bit like the the little bit maybe a glimmer of a smile appears on your face that&#39;s subtlety that&#39;s less that&#39;s hard to get to I I suppose yeah and also because I I I I so well remember I think the work that Brad did in and also Morgan did in that scene but the work that Brad had to do where he had to go I remember rehearsing with him as we were all staying at this little hotel nearby that location and we rehearsed the night before we started shooting that sequence and I just I mean it was just incredible to see the levels of emotions he had to go through and then the decision of what do I do because if I do what he wants me to do then he wins but if I don&#39;t do it then I&#39;m what kind of a man husband am I uh I just thought he did really incredible work so it was also not easy to not react to to the to the power of what he was throwing at me um I just thought it was an extraordinary um a really extraordinary scene so what&#39;s it like being in that scene so it&#39;s you Brad Pit Morgan Freeman and Brad Pit is going over the top just having a mental breakdown and is weighing these extremely difficult moral choices as you&#39;re saying but he&#39;s like screaming and in pain and tormented while you&#39;re very subtly smiling in terms of the writing and in terms of what the characters had to do was it was incredible culmination of how this character um could manipulate in the way that he did and and in the end succeed you mentioned Fincher likes to do a lot of takes that&#39;s the the famous thing about David Fincher so what are the pros and cons of that I think I I read that he does some crazy amount he averages 25 to 65 uh takes and most directors do less than 10 so yeah sometimes it&#39;s timing sometimes it&#39;s literally he has a stopwatch and he&#39;s he&#39;s timing how long a scene is taking and then he&#39;ll say you need to take a minute off this scene like a minute yeah a minute off this scene I want it to move like this so let&#39;s pick it up let&#39;s pick up the pace let&#39;s take let&#39;s see if we can take a minute off why the speed why why say it fast is the important thing for you think I think because Fincher hates Indulgence and he wants he wants people to talk the way they do in life which is you know we don&#39;t take big dramatic pauses yeah right you know before we speak we speak we say what we want we you know and I guess actors like the dramatic pauses and the the the indulge in the dramatic they didn&#39;t always like the dramatic pauses I mean look you didn&#39;t want to you go back any student of acting you go back to the 30s and the 40s 50s the speed at which actors spoke not just in the comedies which of course you know you look at any Preston Sturges movie and it&#39;s incredible how fast people are talking and how and how funny things are when they happen that fast um but then you know acting Styles changed we got into a different kind of thing in the late 50s and 60s and and uh you know a lot of actors are feeling it which is I&#39;m not saying it&#39;s it&#39;s a it&#39;s a bad thing it&#39;s just that if you want to keep an audience engaged as Fincher does and I believe successfully does in all of his work um Pace timing movement Clarity speed are admirable to achieve and all of that he wants the actor to be as natural as possible to strip away all the bullshit of acting and become human look lucky with other directors Sam mes is similar I remember when I walked in to maybe the first rehearsal for Richard III that we were doing and I had brought with me a a canopy of of ailments that my Richard was going to suffer from uh and uh Sam you know eventually whittled it down to like three like maybe your arm and maybe thing and maybe your leg but let&#39;s get rid of the other 10 things that you brought into the room because I was you know I was so excited to you know capture this character so you know very often uh Trevor nun is this way a lot a lot of wonderful directors I&#39;ve worked with they&#39;re really good at helping you trim and edit David Fincher said about you he was talking in general I think but also specifically in the moment of hos cars said that you have exceptional skill both as an actor and as a performer former which he says are different things so he defines the former as dramatization of a text and the latter as the seduction of an audience do you see uh wisdom in that distinction and what does it take to do both the dramatization of a text and the seduction of an audience those are two very interesting descriptions um when I think I guess when I think performer I tend to think entertaining I tend to think uh I tend to think comedy I tend to think winning over an audience I tend to think um that there&#39;s something about um that quality of wanting to of wanting to have people enjoy themselves um and when you saddle that against what maybe he means as an actor which is which is which is which is more dramatic or more more text driven more um look I&#39;ve I&#39;ve always believed that my that my job not every actor feels this way but my job the way that I&#39;ve looked at it is that my job is to serve the writing and that if I serve the writing I will in a sense serve myself because I&#39;ll be in the right World I&#39;ll be in the right context I&#39;ll be in the right style I I I&#39;ll I&#39;ll have embraced what a director&#39;s you know um it&#39;s not my painting it&#39;s someone else&#39;s painting I&#39;m a series of colors and someone else&#39;s painting and the barometer for me has always been that when people stop me and talk to me about a character I&#39;ve played and reference their name as if they actually exist that&#39;s when I feel like I&#39;ve gotten close to doing my job yeah one of the challenges for me in this conversation is remembering that your name is Kevin not Frank or John or any of these characters because they live deeply in the psyche to me that&#39;s the greatest that&#39;s the greatest um um compliment for me as an actor um I I I love being able to go I mean when I think about performers who inspire me and I remember when I was young and I was introduced to Spencer Tracy Henry Fonda Katherine heern I just I believed who they were I knew nothing about them they were just these extraordinary characters doing this extraordinary stuff and then I think more um recently contemporary when I think of the work that Philip seamour Hoffman did and Heath Ledger and people that that when I think about what they could be doing what they could do what they would have done had they stayed with us um I&#39;m so ex I&#39;m so excited when I when I go into a cinema or I go into play and I completely am taken to some place that I believe exists and characters that that become real and those characters become like lifelong companions like for me they travel with you and even if it&#39;s the darkest aspects of human nature they&#39;re always there it&#39;s they almost like I feel like I almost met them and gotten to know them and gotten to become like friends with them almost Hannibal Lecter whether it&#39;s the or or Force Gump mhm I mean I&#39;ve I feel like I&#39;m like best friends with for for Gump I know the guy and I guess he&#39;s played by some guy named Tom but like force Gump is the the guy I&#39;m friends with yeah and I think that everybody feels like that when they&#39;re in the audience with great characters they just kind of they become part of you in some some way the dark the The Good the Bad and the Ugly of them one of the things that I that I feel that I try to do uh in my work is when I read something for the first time when I read a script or a play and I am absolutely devastated by it it is it is the most extraordinary the most beautiful the most life affirming or terrifying it&#39;s then a process weirdly of working backwards because I want to work in such a way that that&#39;s the experience I give to the audience when they first see it that they have the experience I had when I read it I remember that there&#39;s been times in the creative process when something was pointed out to me or something was I I I I remember I was doing a play and I was having this really tough time with a one of the last scenes in the play and I just couldn&#39;t figure it out I was in rehearsal and although we had a director in that play I I called another a friend of mine who was also director and I and I had him come over and I said look this scene I&#39;m just having the toughest I cannot seem to crack this scene and so we we read it through a couple of times and then this this wonderful director named John swanbeck who would eventually direct me in a film called the Big Kahuna but this is before that um he said to me the most incredible thing he just said um all right what&#39;s the last line you have in this scene before you fall over and fall asleep and I said the last line is a that last drink the old KO and he went okay I want you to think about what that line actually means and then work backwards and so he left and I sort of was left with this what like what does that mean how am I supposed to and then like a couple of days went by a couple of days went by and I thought okay so said what is that line actually mean well that last drink the old ko ko is knockout which is a boxing term it&#39;s the only boxing term the writer uses in the play and then I went back and I realized my friend was so smart and so incredible to have you know said ask a question you haven&#39;t thought of asking yet I realized that the playwright wrote the last round the eighth round between these two brothers and it was a fight physical as well as emotional and when I brought that into the rehearsal room to the director was doing that play he liked that idea and we staged that scene as if it was the eighth round although audience wouldn&#39;t have known that but just what I loved about that was that somebody said to me ask yourself a question you haven&#39;t asked yourself yet what does that line mean and then work backwards what is that like a a catalyst for thinking deeply about what is magical about this play this story this narrative that that&#39;s what that is like thinking backwards that&#39;s what that does yeah and but also because it&#39;s just it&#39;s it&#39;s this incredible why didn&#39;t I think to ask that question myself that&#39;s what you have directors for that&#39;s what you have you know so many places where ideas can come from um but that just illustrates that even though in my brain I go I always like to work backwards I I missed it in that one and I&#39;m very grateful to my to my friend for having pushed me into being able to realize what that meant and to ask the interesting question the I like the the poetry and the humility of I&#39;m just a series of colors in someone else&#39;s painting that was a good line uh that said you&#39;ve talked about improvisation you said that it&#39;s all about the ability to do it again and again again and again and yet never make it the same and you also just said that you you&#39;re trying to stay true to the text so where&#39;s the room for the improvisation that it&#39;s never the same well there&#39;s two slightly different contexts I think one is in the rehearsal room um improvisation could be a wonderful device I mean Sam meny for example will will start uh he&#39;ll start a scene and he he does this wonderful thing he brings rugs and he brings chairs and Sofas in and he says well let&#39;s let&#39;s put let&#39;s put two chairs here and here you guys let&#39;s start in these chairs far apart from each other let&#39;s see what happens with the scene if if you&#39;re that far apart and so we&#39;ll do the scene that way and then he goes okay um let&#39;s bring a rug in and let&#39;s bring these chairs much closer and let&#39;s see what happens if if if the space if the space between you is and so then you you you try it that way and then you know it&#39;s a little harder in Shakespeare to impro of um but in any situation where you you want to try and see where where could a seene go where would the scene go if I didn&#39;t make that choice where would the scene go if I made this choice where would the scene go if I didn&#39;t say that or I said something else so that&#39;s how improv can be um a valuable process to learn um about limits and and boundaries um and what&#39;s going on with a a character that somehow you discover in in in trying something that isn&#39;t on the page then there&#39;s the different thing which is the trying to make it fresh and trying to make it new and that is really a reference to theater um I&#39;ll put it to you this way [Music] um anybody loves sports right so you go and you watch on a pitch you watch on a tennis game you watch basketball you watch football yeah the rules are the same but it&#39;s a different game every time you&#39;re out on that court or on that field it&#39;s no different in theater yes it&#39;s the same lines maybe even blocking is similar but what&#39;s different is attack intention how you are growing in a role and watching your fellow actors grow in theirs and how every night it&#39;s a new audience and they&#39;re reacting differently and you literally where you can go from week one of performances in a play to week 12 is extraordinary and the difference between theater and film is that no matter how good someone might think you are in a movie you&#39;ll never be any better it&#39;s frozen whereas I can be better tomorrow night than I was tonight I can be better in a week than I was tonight it is a living breathing shifting changing growing thing every single day but also in theater there&#39;s no safety net if you fuck it up everybody gets to see you do that and if you start giggling on stage everyone gets to see you do that too which I am very guilty of I mean there is something uh of a seduction of an audience in theater even more intense than there is when you&#39;re talking about film just I got a chance to watch the documentary now in the wings on a world stage which is uh behind the scenes of you mentioned uh you teaming up with Sam Mendes in 2011 to Stage Richard III uh a play by William Shakespeare I was also surprised to learn you haven&#39;t really done much Shakespeare or at least you said that in the uh in the movie but there&#39;s a lot of interesting behind the scenes stuff there uh first of all the camaraderie of everybody how like the bond theater creates especially when you&#39;re traveling but the another interesting thing you mentioned with the chairs of Sam man is trying different stuff it seemed like everybody was really open to trying stuff embarrassing themselves taking risks all of that I suppose that&#39;s part of acting in general but theater especially just take risks it&#39;s okay to embarrass the shit out of yourself including the director and it&#39;s also because um you become a family you know it&#39;s unlike a movie where you know I might have a scene with so and so on this day and then another scene with them in a week and a half and then that&#39;s the only scenes we have in the whole movie together um every single day when you show up in the rehearsal room it&#39;s the whole company you&#39;re all up for it every day you&#39;re learning you&#39;re growing you&#39;re trying and and there is a um an incredible trust that happens and I was of course fortunate that that some of the some of the things I learned and observed about um being a part of that family being included in that family and and being a part of creating that family I I I was able to observe from from people like Jack Lemon who Who led many companies that that I was fortunate to to work in and and and be a part of there&#39;s also a sad moment where at the end everybody is really sad to say goodbye because you do form a family and then it&#39;s over I guess somebody said that that&#39;s just part of theater it&#39;s like I mean there&#39;s a kind of assumed goodbye and that this is it yeah and also there are sometimes when like 6 months later I&#39;ll wake up in the middle of the night and I&#39;ll go that&#39;s how to play that scene yeah oh God I just finally figured it out so maybe you could speak a little bit more to that what&#39;s the difference between film acting and live theater acting I don&#39;t really think there is any I think there&#39;s just you eventually learn about yourself on film you know when I first did like my first episode of The Equalizer um you know it&#39;s just it&#39;s just it&#39;s horrible it&#39;s just so bad um but I didn&#39;t know about myself I didn&#39;t so slowly you begin to learn about yourself but I think good acting is good acting and I think that you know if you if a camera is right here you you know that your your front row is also your back row you just don&#39;t have to you don&#39;t have to do so much there is in theater a particular kind of energy almost like an athlete that you have to have vocally to be able to get up seven performances a week and never lose your voice and always be there and always be alive and always be doing the best work you can that you just don&#39;t require in film you know you don&#39;t have to have the same um it it just doesn&#39;t require the same uh kind of stamina that doing a play does it just feels like also in theater you have to become the character more intensely because you can&#39;t take a break you can&#39;t take a bathroom break you&#39;re like on stage there&#39;s no this is you yeah but you have no idea what&#39;s going on on stage with the actors I mean I I I have I have literally laughed through speeches that I had to give because my fellow actors were carrots up their nose or broccoli in their ears or doing whatever they were doing to make me laugh so they&#39;re just having fun they&#39;re having the time of their life and by the way Judy Dench is the worst giggler of all yeah I mean they had to bring the curtain down on her and Maggie Smith because they were laughing so hard they could not continue the play so even when you&#39;re doing like a dramatic monologue still they&#39;re still fucking with you there&#39;s stuff okay that&#39;s great that&#39;s good to know you also said interesting line that improvisation helps you uh learn about the character uh can you explain that so like through maybe playing with the different ways of saying the words or the different ways to bring the words to life you get to learn about yourself about the character you&#39;re playing it can be helpful um but improv is I&#39;m a big such a big believer in the in the the writing and in serving the writing and doing the words the writer wrote um that improv for for me unless you&#39;re just doing like comedy and you know like I mean I love improv and in comedy it&#39;s it&#39;s brilliant um so much fun to watch people just come up with something right there um but you&#39;re you know that that&#39;s where you&#39;re looking for laughs and you&#39;re you&#39;re specifically in a little scene that&#39;s being created um but I think improv is has has had value um but I I I have not experienced it as much in doing plays um as I have sometimes in doing in doing film where you&#39;ll you&#39;ll start off rehearsing and a director may say let&#39;s just go off book and see what happens and I&#39;ve had moments in film where someone went off book and it was terrifying there was a scene I had in Glen Gary Glenn rth where the character I play has has fucked something up it&#39;s just screwed something up and Pacino is living and so we had the scene where Al is walking like this and the camera is moving with him and he is shoo me a new asshole and in the middle of the take Al starts talking about me oh Kevin you don&#39;t think we know how you got this job you don&#39;t think we know whose dick you&#39;ve been sucking on to get this part in this movie and I&#39;m now I&#39;m literally like I don&#39;t I don&#39;t know what the hell is happening but I&#39;m reacting we got to the end of that take Al walked up to me and he went oh that was so good oh my God that was so good just so you know the sound I asked them not to record so you have no dialogue so it&#39;s just me oh that was so good you look you look like a car wreck yeah and I was like yeah and it was actually an incredibly generous thing that he gave me so that I would react oh wow did they use that shot because you were shot it was my closeup yeah yeah and yeah that&#39;s the take that was an intense intera I mean what was it like if we can just Linger on that just that intense scene with alucino well he&#39;s the reason I got the movie A lot of people might think because Jack was in the film that he had something to do with it but actually I was doing a play called Lost and Yonkers on Broadway and we had the same dresser who worked with him a girl named Laura it was wonderful uh Laura Bey and uh she told Al that he should come and see this play because she wanted to see me in this play I was playing this gangster it was fun fun fun part so I didn&#39;t know Pacino came on some night and saw this play and then like three days later I got a call to come in an audition for this Glen greglen Ross which of course I knew is a play David Mambo&#39;s play and then uh I auditioned Jamie Foley was the director who would eventually direct a bunch of House of Cards wonderful wonderful guy and I got the part well I didn&#39;t quite get the part they were going to bring together the actors that they thought they were going to give the parts to on a Saturday at Al&#39;s office and they asked me if I would come and do a read through and I said who&#39;s going to be there and they said well so and so and so and so and so then Jack Lemon is flying and I said don&#39;t tell Mr Lemon that I&#39;m doing the readr is that possible they were like sure so I&#39;ll never forget this Jack was sitting in a chair in Pacino&#39;s office doing the New York Times crossword puzzle as he did every day like this and I walked in the door and he went oh Jesus Christ is it possible you could get a job without me Jesus Christ I&#39;m so tired of holding up your end of it oh my God Jesus um so that&#39;s I got the job job because of a Pacino and and you know I I was it was it was really one of the first major roles that I ever had in a film and you know to be working with that group yeah that&#39;s like one of the greatest Ensemble casts ever we got Al Pacino Jack Lemon Alec Baldwin Alan Arin Ed Harris you Jonathan price it&#39;s just incredible and I would have to say I mean maybe you can comment you&#39;ve You&#39; you&#39;ve talked about how how much of a mentor and a friend Jack Clem has been that&#39;s one of his greatest performances ever ever you have a scene at the end of the movie with him that was really powerful like firing on all cylinders you&#39;re playing disdain to Perfection and he&#39;s playing desperation to Perfection what a scene what was that like just like at the top of your game the two of you well by that time we had done long day journey tonight in the theater we&#39; done a minseries called the murder of Mary figan on NBC we done a film called Dad that Gary David Goldberg directed with Ted dansen so this was the fourth time we were working together and we knew each other we become he become my father figure and and I don&#39;t know if you know that I originally met Jack Lemon when I was very very young he was doing a production at the marer form of a Shan O Casey play called Juno and the peock with Walter Matthau and Marine Stapleton and on a Saturday in December of 1974 my Junior High School drama class went to a workshop it was called how to audition and we did this Workshop many schools in Southern California were part of this drama Teachers Association so we got these incredible experiences of being able to go see professional Productions and be involved in these workshops or festivals so I had to get up and do a monologue in front of Mr Lemon when I was 13 years old and he walked up to me at the end of that and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said that was a such terrific he said no I everything I&#39;ve been talking about you just did yeah what&#39;s your name I said Kevin he said wellit let me tell you something when you get finished with high schools I&#39;m sure you&#39;re going to go on and do theater you should go to New York and you should study to be an actor because this is what you&#39;re meant to do with your life and he was like an idol and 12 years later I read in the New York Times that he was coming to Broadway to do this production of a Long Day&#39;s Journey tonight a year and some months after I read this article and I was like I&#39;m going to play Jamie in that production and I then with a lot of opposition because the cast and director didn&#39;t want to see me they they said that the director Jonathan Miller uh Wanted movie actors to play the two sons and ultimately I I uh I found out that Jonathan Miller the director was coming to New York to do a series of lectures at Alice Tully Hall and I uh went to try to figure out how I could maybe meet him and uh I was sitting in that theater listening to this incredible lexury he was doing and sitting next to me was an elderly woman I mean elderly 80 something and she was asleep but sticking out of her handbag which was on the floor was a invitation to a cocktail reception in honor of Dr Jonathan Miller and so I I thought you know she&#39;s tired she&#39;s probably going to go home so I I I took that and walked into this cocktail reception and ultimately went over to Dr Miller who was incredibly kind and said you sit down always very curious what brings young people to my lectures and I said to him Eugene O&#39;Neal brought me here and he was like what what what I&#39;ve always wanted to meet him where is he and I told him that I&#39;d been trying for 7 months to get an audition for long day journey and that his American casting directors were telling my agents that he wanted big American movie stars and at that moment he turned and he saw one of those casting director who was there that night CU I knew he was going to be in New York starting auditions that week and she was staring daggers at me and he just got it and he said to someone have a pen and he took the little paper started writing he said listen Kevin there there are many situations in which casting directors have a lot of say and a lot of power and a lot of Leverage and then there are other situations where they just take director&#39;s messages and on this one they&#39;re taking my messages this is where I&#39;m St make sure you people get to me we start auditions on Thursday and on Thursday I had an opportunity to come in and audition for this play that I&#39;ve been working on and preparing and at the end of it I did four scenes at the end of it he said to me that unless someone else came in and blew him against the wall like I had just done as far as he was concerned I pretty much had the part but I couldn&#39;t tell my agents that yet because I had to come back and read with Mr Lemon and so 3 months later in August of 1985 I found myself in a room with Jack Lemon again at 890 Broadway which is where they rehearse a lot of Broadway plays and we did four scenes together and I was toppling over him I was pushing him I was I was relentless and I&#39;ll never forget at the end of that lemon came over to me he put his hand on my shoulder and he said that would you should touch a terrific I never thought we&#39;d find the rotten kid but he&#39;s it Jesus Christ what the hell was that and I ended up spending the next year of my life with that man so it turns out he was right yeah this world works in mysterious ways it also speaks to the fact of the power of somebody you look up to giving words of encouragement CU those can just reverberate through your whole life and just like make the path clear I&#39;ve always we used to we used to joke that uh if every contract came with a Jack Lemon Clause it would be a more beautiful world beautifully said Jack Lemon is one of the greatest actors ever what do you think makes him so damn good wow um I think he I I think he truly set out in his life to accomplish what his father said to him on his deathbed his father was Dy his father was by the way called the dut King in Boston and uh not in the entertainment business at all he was literally owned a doughnut company and uh when he was passing away Jack said the last thing my father said to me was go out there and spread a little sunshine shine and I truly think that&#39;s what Jack loved to do I remember this um and I don&#39;t know if this is uh will answer your question but I think it&#39;s revealing about what he&#39;s able to do and what he was able to do and how that ultimately influenced what I was able to do Sam endes had never directed a film before American Beauty and so what he did was he took the best elements of theater and applied them to the process so we rehearsed it like a play in a sound stage where everything was laid out like it would be in a play and this couch will be here and he&#39;d sent me a couple of tapes he&#39;d sent me a two cassette tapes one that he&#39; likeed to call pre- Lester before he begins to um move in a New Direction and then post Lester and they just were different songs um and then he said to me one day and I think always thought this was brilliant of Sam to use lemon knowing what lemon meant to me he said when was the last time you watched the apartment and I saidh I don&#39;t know I mean I love that movie so much he goes I want you to watch it again and then let&#39;s talk so I went and I watched the movie again and we sat down and Sam said what lemon does in that film is incredible because there is never a moment in the movie where we see him change he just evolves and he becomes the man he becomes because of the experiences that he has the course of the film but there&#39;s this remarkable consistency in who he becomes and that&#39;s what I need you to do is Lester I don&#39;t want the audience to ever see him change I want him to evolve and so we did some I mean first of all it was just a great Direction and then second of all we did some things that people don&#39;t know we did to Aid that gradual shift of that man&#39;s character first of all I had to be in the best shape from the beginning of the movie because we didn&#39;t shoot it in sequence so I was in this crazy shape I had this wonderful uh trainer named Mike torsa who just was incredible but so what we did was in order to then show this gradual shift was I had three different hair pieces I had three different kinds of costumes of different colors and sizes and I had different makeup so in the beginning I was wearing a kind of drab dull slightly you know uninspired hairpiece and my makeup was kind of gray and boring and I was a little bit there were times when I was like too much like this and Sam would go Kevin you look like Walter Matha would you please stand up a little bit we&#39;re sort of Midway through at this point and the then at a certain point the wig changed and it had little highlights in it a little more color a little more the makeup became a little the the suits got a little tighter and then finally a third wig that was golden highlights and sunshine and and you know rosy cheeks and tight fit and these are what we call theatrical tricks you know this is this is how you an audience doesn&#39;t even know it&#39;s happening but it is this gradual and I just always felt that that was such a um a brilliant way because he knew what I felt about Jack and when you watch the apartment it is extraordinary that he doesn&#39;t ever change he just so I&#39;m I&#39;m and in fact I I thanked Jack um when I won the Oscar and uh he I I did my thank you speech and I walked off stage and I remember I had to sit down for a moment because I didn&#39;t want to go I didn&#39;t want to go to The Press Room because I wanted to see if Sam was going to win and so I was waiting and my phone rang and it was lemon he said you&#39;re a son of a bitch I said I said what he goes first of all congratulations and thanks for thanking me cuz you know God knows you couldn&#39;t have done it without me he said second of all he said you know how long it took me to win from supporting actor I wanted for Mr Roberts and it took me like 10 12 years to win Oscar you did it in four you son of a bitch yeah the apartment was I mean it&#39;s widely considered one of the greatest movies ever people sometimes refer to as a comedy which is an interesting kind of classification I suppose that&#39;s a lesson about comedy that the best uh the best comedy is the one that&#39;s basically a tragedy well I mean some people think Clockwork Orange is a comedy and I&#39;m not saying there aren&#39;t some good laughs in Clockwork Orange but yeah you know it&#39;s I mean yeah what&#39;s that line between uh comedy and tragedy for you I well I if it&#39;s a line it&#39;s a line I cross all the time because I&#39;ve tried always to find the humor um unexpected sometimes uh maybe inappropriate sometimes maybe shocking but I&#39;ve tried in I think almost every dramatic role I&#39;ve had to have a sense of humor and to be able to bring that uh along with everything else that is serious because frankly that&#39;s how we deal with stuff in life you know I think uh Sam menz actually said in the N documentary something like with great theater with with great stories you find humor on the journey to the Heart of Darkness something like this very poetic stood to me I&#39;m sorry I can&#39;t be that poetic I&#39;m very sorry but it&#39;s true I mean the the the people have interacted in this world have been to a war zone and the ones who have lost the most and have suffered the most are are usually the ones who are able to uh make jokes the quickest and the jokes are often dark and absurd and cross every single line no political correctness all of that sure well I mean you know it&#39;s like uh the great Mary Tyler Moore Show where they can&#39;t stop giggling at at the Clown funeral I mean it&#39;s it&#39;s just one of the great episodes ever you know giggling at a funeral is as bad as farting at a funeral and you know I&#39;m I&#39;m sure that there&#39;s some people who&#39;ve done both oh man uh so you mentioned American Beauty and the idea of uh not changing but evolving that&#39;s really interesting because that movie is about like finding yourself it&#39;s a it&#39;s a philosophically profound movie it&#39;s about various characters in their own ways finding their own identity in a world where um maybe a system of a materialistic system that wants you to be like everyone else and so I mean Lester is really transforms himself throughout the movie and you&#39;re saying the challenge there is to still be the same human being fundamentally yeah and I also think that the film was powerful because you had three very honest and genuine portrayal of young people and then you had Lester behaving like a young person um doing things that were unexpected and and uh and I think that um the honesty with which it dealt with those uh issues that those teenagers were going through and the honesty with which it dealt with what Lester was going through um I think our some of the reasons why the film had the response that it did from so many people I mean I I used to get stopped and someone would say to me when I first saw American Beauty I was married and the second time I saw it I wasn&#39;t and I was like well we weren&#39;t trying to increase the divorce rate you know that wasn&#39;t Our intention but it is interesting how so many people um have those kinds of crazy fantasies and what I admired so much about who Lester was as a person why I wanted to play him is because in the end he makes the right decision I think a lot of people live lives of quiet desperation in a in a job they don&#39;t like in a marriage they&#39;re unhappy in and to see somebody living that life and then saying fuck it in every way possible and not just in a cynical way but in a way that opens them opens Lester up to see the beauty in the world that&#39;s you know the beauty in American Beauty it&#39;s well and you know you may have to Blackmail your boss to get there but you know and in that there&#39;s a bunch of humor also in the uh in the anger and the in the absurdity of sort of taking a stand against the Conformity of Life there there&#39;s there&#39;s humor and um I read somewhere that the scene the dinner scene which is kind of play likee where Lester slams the plate against the wall was improvised by you the uh the slamming of the plate against the wall no no absolutely the internet absolutely absolutely uh uh written and and directed uh um yeah can&#39;t take credit for that the plate okay well that was a that was a genius interaction there um there&#39;s something about the dinner table and losing your shit at the dinner table having a fight and losing your shit at the dinner table um where where else like Yellowstone was another situation where it&#39;s a family at the dinner table and then one of them says fucking I&#39;m not eating this anymore and I&#39;m going to create a scene right it&#39;s a beautiful kind of environment for dramatic scenes or or Nicholson in The Shining I mean there&#39;s some there&#39;s some family scenes gone ay in that movie The contrast between you and Annette Benning in that scene creates The Genius of that scene so how much of acting is the dance between two actors well with an nette I just adored working with her and we were the two actors that Sam wanted from the very beginning much against the will of the higher ups who wanted other actors to play those roles but um I&#39;ve known Annette since we did a screen test together for Milos Foreman for a film he did of the L on dangerus movie it was a different film from that one but it was the same story and I&#39;ve always thought she is just remarkable and I think that the work she did in that film the relationship that um we were able to build um for me the saddest part of that success was that she didn&#39;t win the Oscar and I felt she should have what what kind of interesting direction did you get from from Sam mendz in how you approach playing Lester and the different how to take on the different scenes there&#39;s a lot of just brilliant scenes in that movie well I I&#39;ll I&#39;ll share with you a story that most people don&#39;t know um which is our first two days of shooting were in Smiley the place where I get a job in a fast food place yeah it&#39;s a burger joint yeah yeah and um I guess it was like maybe the third day or the fourth day of shooting we&#39; now done that and I said to Sam so how how are the dailies you know how how do they look he goes which ones I said well the first Smiley he goes oh um they&#39;re shit and I went yeah no how were they he goes no they&#39;re shit I hate them I hate everything about them I hate the costumes I hate the location I hate that you&#39;re inside I hate the way you acted I Hate Everything But the script so I&#39;ve gone back to the studio and asked them if we can reshoot the first two days and I was like Sam this is your very first movie you you&#39;re going back to Steph Spielberg and saying I need to reshoot the the first two days entirely and he went yeah and that&#39;s exactly what we did a couple of weeks later they decided that it was now a drive-thru because Annette and Peter Galler used to come into the place and ordered from the counter now Sam had decided it has to be a drive-thru you have to be in the window of the the drive-thru changed the costumes and we reshot those first two days and Sam said it was actually a moment of incredible confidence because he said the worst thing that could possibly have happened happened in my first two days and after that I was like I know what I&#39;m doing and I knew I had to reshoot it and it was absolutely right and I guess that&#39;s what a great director must do is have the guts in that moment to re-shoot everything I that&#39;s a pretty gutsy move two other little things to share with you about Sam but the way he is you wouldn&#39;t know it but the original script opened and closed with a trial Ricky was accused of Lester&#39;s murder and the movie was bookended by this trial it&#39;s a very different movie which they shot the entire trial for weeks okay wow yeah and I used to fly in my dreams you know those opening shots over the neighborhood I used to come into those shots in my bathrobe flying and then when I hit the ground and the newspaper was thrown at me by the newspaper guy and I caught it the alarm would go off and I wake up in bed I spent 5 days being hung by wires and filming these sequences of flying through my dreams and Sam said to me yeah the flying sequences are all gone and the trial is gone and I was like what what are you talking about um and here&#39;s my other little favorite um story about Sam and that when we were shooting in the valley one of those places I flew this was an indoor set um Sam said to me in the morning hey at lunch I just want to record a guide track of all the dialogue all of your narration cuz they just needed an editing as a guide and I said sure So I remember we came outside of this in this hallway where I had a dressing room in this little Studio we were in and Sam had like a cassette tape recorder and like a little microphone and we put it on the floor and he pushed record and I read the entire narration and I never did it again that&#39;s the narration in the movie because Sam said when he listened to it I wasn&#39;t trying to do anything he said you had no idea where these things were going where they were going to be placed what they were going to mean you just read it so innocently so purely so directly that I I knew if I brought you into a studio and put headphones on you and had you do it again it would change the ease with which you&#39;d done it and so they just fixed all of the problems that they had with this little cassette and that is the way I did it and the only time I did it was in this little hallway and once again a great performance lies in being uh doing less yeah yeah the innocence and the purity of lust he knew I would have come into the studio and fucked it up yeah what do you think about the notion of beauty that permeates American Beauty what do you think that theme is with the roses with the rose petals the the characters that are living this mundane existence slowly opening their eyes up to uh what is beautiful in life see it&#39;s funny I don&#39;t think of the roses and I don&#39;t think of her body and the poster and I don&#39;t think of those things as the beauty um I think of the bag I think that there are things we miss that are right in front of us that are truly beautiful the little things the simple things yeah and in fact I&#39;ll even tell you something that I always thought was so incredible when we shot uh the scenes in the office where Lester worked the job he hated there was a bulletin board behind me on a wall and someone who was watching a cut or early dailies who was in the marketing department saw that someone had cut out a little piece of paper and stuck it and it said look closer and they presented that to Sam as the idea of what that should that could go on the poster the idea of looking closer was such a brilliant idea but it wasn&#39;t I mean it wasn&#39;t like wasn&#39;t in the script it was just on a wall behind me and someone happened to zoom in on it and see it and thought that&#39;s what this movie is about this movie is about taking the time to look closer and I think that in itself is just beautiful mortality also permeates the film you know it starts with acknowledging that death is on the way that uh your your Lester&#39;s time is finite you ever think about your own death yeah scared of it um when I was at my lowest point yes it scared me what what does that fear look like what what&#39;s the nature of the fear what are you afraid of that there&#39;s no way out that there&#39;s no answer um that nothing makes sense see the interesting thing about Lester is facing the same fear he seemed to be somehow liberated and accepted everything yeah and then saw the beauty of it cuz he got there he was given the opportunity to to reinvent himself and to and to try things he&#39;d never tried to ask questions he&#39;d never asked to to trust his instincts and to become the best version of himself he could become and so Dick Van djk who is uh has become an extraordinary friend of mine dick is 98 years old and he says you know if I known I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself um when I spend time with him him I&#39;m just moved by every day you know he gets up and he goes it&#39;s a good day I woke up and I learn a lot about I I have a a different feeling about death now than I did seven years ago uh and I on the path to being able to be in a place where I&#39;ve resolved the things I needed to resolve and won&#39;t won&#39;t probably get to all of it in my lifetime but I certainly would like to be at a place where if I were if I were to Dro dead tomorrow it would have been an amazing life so Lester got there it sounds like dig Fang Dy got there you&#39;re trying to get there sure you said you feared death at your lowest Point what was the lowest point it was uh November 1st of 2017 and then Thanksgiving Day of that same year so let&#39;s talk about it let&#39;s talk about this dark time let&#39;s talk about the sexual allegations against you that led to you being cancelled by uh well the entire world for the last seven years I would like to personally understand the sins the bad things you did and the bad things you didn&#39;t do so I also should say that the thing I hope to do here is to give respect to Due Process innocent until proven guilty that the mass hysterium machine of the internet and clickbait journalism doesn&#39;t do so here&#39;s what I understand there were criminal and civil trials brought against you including the one that started it all when Anthony rap sued you for $40 million in these trials you were acquitted found not guilty and not liable is that right yes I think that&#39;s really important again in terms of due process and I read a a lot and I watched a lot in preparation for this on this on this point Point um including of course the recently uh detailed interviews you did with Dan Wooten and then Allison Pearson of the Telegraph and those are all focused on this topic and they go in detail where you respond in detail to many of the allegations if people are interested in the details they can listen to those So based on that and everything I looked at as I understand you never prevented anyone from leaving if they wanted to sort of in the sexual context for example by blocking the door is that right that&#39;s correct yeah you always respected the explicit know from people again the sexual context is that right that is correct you&#39;ve never done anything sexual with an underage person right never and also as is sometimes done in Hollywood let me ask this you&#39;ve never explicitly offered to exchange sexual favors for career advancement correct correct in terms of bad behavior what did you do what was the the worst of it and how often did you do it I have heard now quite often that everybody has a Kevin Spacey story um and what that tells me is that I hit on a lot of guys how often did you cross the line and what does that mean to you I did a lot of horsing around I did a lot of things that at the time I thought were sort of playful and fun and I have learned since we&#39;re not and I have had to recognize that I I crossed some boundaries and I did some things that were wrong and I made some mistakes and that&#39;s in my past I mean I&#39;ve been working so hard over these last seven years to have the conversations I needed to have to listen to people to understand things from a different perspective than the one that I had and to say I will never behave that way again for the rest of my life just to clarify I think your were often too pushy with the flirting and that manifested itself in in multiple ways but just to make clear you never prevented anyone from leaving if they wanted to you always took the explicit no from people as an answer no stop you took that for the answer you&#39;ve never done anything sexual with an underage person and you&#39;ve never explic offered to exchange sexual favors for career advancement these are some of the sort of accusations that have been made and in the court of law multiple times have been shown not to be true but I have had a sexual life and I&#39;ve fallen in love and I&#39;ve been so admir admiring of people that I that I I mean I&#39;m I&#39;m so romantic I&#39;m such a romantic person that there&#39;s this whole side of me that hasn&#39;t been talking about isn&#39;t being discussed but that&#39;s that&#39;s who I know that&#39;s the person I know it&#39;s been very upsetting to hear that some people have said I I mean I don&#39;t have a violent bone in my body but to hear people describe things as having been very aggressive is incredibly um difficult for me and I&#39;m deeply sorry that I ever offended anyone or hurt anyone in any way it is it is crushing to me and I have to work very hard to show and to prove that I have learned um I&#39;ve got the memo and I will never ever ever behave in those ways again from everything I&#39;ve seen in public interactions with you people love you colleagues love you co-workers love you they there&#39;s a flirtatiousness another word for that is chemistry there&#39;s a Chemistry Between the people you work with and by the way not to take anything away from my accountability for things I did where I got it wrong I crossed the line I pushed some boundaries I accept all of that but I live in an industry in which flirtation uh attraction people meeting in the workspace and ending up marrying each other and having children and so it is a it is a it is a space and a place where these Notions of family these Notions of attraction these Notions of It&#39;s Always complicated if you meet someone in the workspace and find yourselves attracted to each other you have to be mindful of that and you have to be very mindful that you don&#39;t ever want anyone to feel that um their job is in Jeopardy um or you would punish them in some way if they no longer wanted to be with you so those are important uh things to just acknowledge another complexity to this as as I&#39;ve seen is that there&#39;s just a huge number of actors that look up to you a huge number of people in the industry that look up to you so just and love you I I&#39;ve seen just from this documentary just a lot of people just love being around you uh learning from you what it means to create great Theater Great film great stories and so that adds to the complexity I wouldn&#39;t say it&#39;s a power Dynamic like a boss employee relationship it&#39;s a admiration Dynamic that is easy to miss and easy to take advantage of is that something you understand yes and I also understand that there are people who met me and spent a very brief period of time with me but presumed I was now going to be their mentor and then behaved in a way that I was unaware of that they were either participating or flirting along uh or encouraging me uh without me having any idea that that at the end of the day they were expecting something um so these are about relationships that these are about two people these are about people making decisions people making choices and I I accept my accountability in that but there are a number of things that I&#39;ve been accused of that just simply did not happen and and I can&#39;t say and I don&#39;t think it would be right for me to say well I you know everything that&#39;s ever been I&#39;ve been accused of is true because we&#39;ve now proved that it isn&#39;t and it wasn&#39;t um but I&#39;m perfectly willing to accept that I had behaviors that were wrong and that I shouldn&#39;t have done and I am regretful for I think that&#39;s also speaks to uh Dark Side of Fame the sense I got is that there are some people potentially a lot of people trying to make friends with you in order to get roles in order to advance their career so not you using them but they trying to use you uh what&#39;s that like how do you know if somebody likes you for you for Kevin or likes you for uh like you you said you&#39;re romantic you see a person and you&#39;re like I like this person and they seem to like you how do you know if they like you for you well to some degree I would say that I have been able to trust my instincts on that and that I&#39;ve most of the time been right but obviously in the last number of years not just with people who&#39;ve accused me but just also people in my own industry you know to realize that oh I thought we had a friendship but I guess that was about an inch thick and and and not what I thought it was um but look the you know one shouldn&#39;t be surprised by that I have to also say you know you said a little while ago that the world had canceled me and I have to disagree with you I have to disagree because for seven years I&#39;ve been stopped by people sometimes every day sometimes multiple multiple times a day and the conversations that I have with people the generosity that they share the kindness that they show and how much they want to know when I&#39;m getting back to work tells me that while there may be a very loud minority there is a quieter majority in the industry have you been betrayed in life and how do you not let that make you cynical I think betrayal is a really interesting word but I think if you&#39;re going to be betrayed it has to be by those who truly know you and I can tell you that I have not been betrayed that&#39;s a beautiful way to put it for the times you cross the line do you take responsibility for the wrongs you&#39;ve done yes are you sorry to the people you may have hurt emotionally yes and I have spoken to many of them privately privately which is where amend should be made were they able to start finding forgiveness absolutely some of the most moving conversations that I have had when I was determined to take accountability have been those people have said thank you so much and I think I can forgive you now if you got a chance to talk to the Kevin Spacey of 30 to 40 years ago what would you uh tell him to change about his ways and how how would you do it what what would be your approach would you be nice about it would you smack them around I think if I were to go back that far I probably would have found a way to um not have been as concerned about my revealing my sexuality and hiding that for as long as I did I think that had a um a lot to do with confusion and a lot to do with mistrust um both my own and other people&#39;s for for most of your life you were not open with the public about being gay what was the hardest thing about keeping who you love a secret that I didn&#39;t find the right moment of Celebration to be able to share that that must be a thing that weighs on you to not be able to fully yeah celebrate your love you know Ian McKellen said after 40 he was 49 when he came out 27 years he&#39;d been a professional actor being in the closet and he said he felt it was like he was living a part of his life not being truthful and that he felt that it affected his work when he did come out because he no longer felt like he had anything to hide and I absolutely believe that that is what my experience has been and will continue to be um I I am sorry about the way I came out um but I had but Evan and I had already had the conversation I was I had already decided to come out and so it wasn&#39;t like oh I I was forced to come out but it was something I decided to do and by the way much against evans&#39;s advice I I I came out in that statement and he wishes that I I had not done so yeah you made a statement uh when um the initial accusation happened there could be up there&#39;s one of the worst social media posts of all time into it&#39;s like two for one don&#39;t hold back now come on really tell me how you feel the first part you kind of implicitly admitted to doing something bad which was later shown and proved completely to never have happened it was a a lie no I I I basically said that I didn&#39;t remember what this person was the Anthony rap was claiming from 31 years before uh I had no memory of it but if it had happened if this embarrassing moment had happened then I would owe him an apology that was what I said and then I said and while I&#39;m at it I think I&#39;ll come out and you know it was definitely not the greatest coming out party ever I I I will admit that but from the public perception the first part of that so first of all the second part is a is a horrible way to come out yes we all agree and then the first part from the public Viewpoint they see Guilt in that which also is tragic because at least that particular accusation and is a very dramatic one it&#39;s a $40 million lawsuit it&#39;s a big deal and an underage person was shown to be false well but you&#39;re you&#39;re melding two things together the lawsuit didn&#39;t happen until 2020 and then it didn&#39;t get to court until 2022 we&#39;re back in 2017 when it was just an accusation he made in BuzzFeed magazine um look I I was backed into a corner when someone says you were so drunk you won&#39;t remember this thing happened what&#39;s your first instinct is your first instinct to say this person&#39;s a liar or is your first instinct to go what I was what 31 years at a party I don&#39;t even remember throwing obviously a lot of Investigation happened after that in which we were then able to prove in that in that court case that it had never occurred but at the moment I was sort of being told I couldn&#39;t push back I you have to be kind you can&#39;t I think you know even to me now none of it sounds right but I don&#39;t know that I could have said anything that would have been satisfactory to anybody okay there&#39;s a almost convincing explanation for the worst social media post of all time I almost accept it I&#39;m really surprised you you I guess you haven&#39;t read a lot of media posts cuz I can&#39;t believe that&#39;s the actual worst one it&#39;s it&#39;s beautifully bad that&#39;s how bad that social media post is as you mentioned uh Liam niss and Sharon Stone came out and suppor of you recently uh speaking to your character a lot of people who know you and some of whom I know uh who have worked with you privately show support for you but are afraid to speak up publicly what do you make of that I mean to me personally this just makes me sad because perhaps that&#39;s the nature of the industry that it&#39;s difficult to do that but I just wish there would be a little bit more courage in the world I I don&#39;t think it&#39;s about the industry I think it&#39;s about our time I think it&#39;s the time that we&#39;re in and people are very afraid just afraid just a general General no they&#39;re literally afraid that um they&#39;re going to get cancelled if they stand up for someone who has been um and I think it&#39;s I mean you know we&#39;ve seen this many times in history this is not the first time it&#39;s happened so as you said your darkest moment in 17 when all of this went down uh one of the things that happened is you were no longer on the hos of cards for the last season uh let&#39;s go to the beginning of that show okay one of the greatest TV series of all time a dark fascinating character in Frank Underwood a ruthless cunning borderline evil politician uh what are some interesting aspects uh to the process you went through for becoming Frank Underwood maybe Richard III there&#39;s a lot of elements there in your performance that maybe uh inspired that character well is that fair or no I&#39;ll give you uh I&#39;ll give you one very interesting um specific education that I got in doing Richard III and closing that show at Dam in March of 2012 and two months later started shooting House of Cards there is something called direct address um in Shakespeare um you have Hamlet talks to the world but when Shakespeare wrote Richard III it was the first time he created something called direct address which is the character looks directly at each person close by it is a different kind of uh sharing than when a character is doing a monologue a opening of Henry 4 um and while there are some people who believe that director dress was invented in Ferris buer it wasn&#39;t it was Shakespeare who invented it so I had just had this experience every night in theaters all over the world seeing how people reacted to becoming a co-conspirator because that&#39;s what it&#39;s about and what I tried to do and what uh finer really helped me with in those beginning days um was how to look in that camera and imagine I was talking to my best friend because you&#39;re sharing the secret of the darkness of how this game is played with that best friend yeah and there were many times when um I I I suppose the writers thought I was crazy where I would see a script and I would see like this moment where this direct address would happen i&#39;&#39;d say all this stuff and I&#39;d go and we do a read through of the script I go I don&#39;t think I need to say any of that and they were like what do you mean I said well the audience knows all of that all I have to do is look they know exactly what&#39;s going on I don&#39;t need to say a thing so I was often cutting dialogue um because it just wasn&#39;t needed because that relationship between that I&#39;d learned that I&#39;d experienced doing Richard III was so extraordinary where I literally watched people they were like oh I&#39;m in on the thing and this is so awesome and then suddenly wait he killed the kids he killed those kids in the tower oh maybe it&#39;s not so and you literally would watch them start to re reverse their having had such a great time with Richard III and the first you know three acts I thought this is going to happen in this show if this um intimacy can actually land um and I think just think there was some brilliant writing and we always attempted to do it in one take no matter how long something was we would try to do it in one take the direct addresses so there was never a cut when we went on a locations we started to then find ways to cut it and make it slightly broader but that&#39;s interesting cuz you&#39;re you&#39;re doing a bunch of with both Richard third and Frank Underwood a bunch of dark borderline evil things and then I guess the idea is you&#39;re going to be losing the audience and then you win them back over with the addresses that&#39;s the remarkable thing is against their instincts and their better sense of what they should and should not do they still rallied around Frank Underwood and I saw even with the documentary The glimmers of that with Richard III I mean you were seducing the audience like there was such a chemistry between you and the audience on stage yeah yeah well he in that production that&#39;s absolutely true um also Richard is one of the weirder uh weird I mean by weird was an early play of Shakespeare&#39;s and he&#39;s basically never off stage I mean I remember when we did the first run through I had no idea what the next scene was every time I came off stage I had no idea what was next they literally had to drag me from one place to another say now it&#39;s the scene with hting now it&#39;s the but I now understand these wonderful stories that you can read in in old books about Shakespeare&#39;s time that actors grabbed Shakespeare around the cuff and punched him and threw him up against wall and said you ever write a part like this again I&#39;m going to kill you and that&#39;s why in later plays he started to have pageant happened and then a wedding happened and the main character was offstage resting because the actor had said you can&#39;t do this to us there&#39;s no breaks and it&#39;s true there&#39;s very few breaks in Richard II you&#39;re on stage most of the time the comedic aspect of Richard III and Frank Underwood is is that a component that helps bring out the full complexity of the the darkness that is Frank Underwood I I certainly can&#39;t uh take credit for Shakespeare having written something that is funny or B willan and his team to have written something that is funny is fundamentally funny it just depends on how on how I interpret it on on uh you know there are you know that&#39;s one of the great things why we love you know in a years&#39;s time we can see five different hamlets we can see four Richard III&#39;s we can see to Richard II&#39;s that&#39;s part of the thrill that we don&#39;t own these parts we borrow them and we interpret them and what Ian McKellen might do with a role could be completely different from what I might do because of the way we perceive it and also very often in terms of going for humor it&#39;s very often a director will say why don&#39;t you say that with a bit of irony why don&#39;t you try that with a bit of B yeah there&#39;s often that that like a a Ry smile the line that jumps to me when you&#39;re talking about Claire um in the early maybe first episode even I love that woman more than sharks love blood I just there and I mean I guess there&#39;s a lot of ways to read that line but the way you read it had both humor had legitimate affection had all the ambition and narcissism all of that mixed up together I also think that one should just acknowledge that where he was from there is something that happens when you do an accent and in fact sometimes the when I would say to Bo or or one of the other writers this is really good and I love the idea but it rhythmically doesn&#39;t help I I I need I need at least two more words to rhythmically make this work in his accent because it just doesn&#39;t scan uh and that&#39;s not I Amic pentameter I&#39;m not talking about that there is that as well in Shakespeare but there was sometimes when it&#39;s too many lines it&#39;s not enough lines in order for me to make this work uh for the way he speaks the way he sounds and what that accent does to emphasis how much of that character in terms of the musicality of the way he speaks is Bill Clinton uh not really at all I mean Clinton you know look Bill Clinton he had a way of talking you know that he was very slow and he felt your pain you know but Frank Underwood was a a deeper um more direct um and less poetic uh in the way that that uh Clinton would talk I&#39;ll tell you this Clinton story that you&#39;ll like so we decided to do a performance of The Iceman Cometh for the Democratic party on Broadway and the president is going to come he&#39;s going to see this 4 and a half hour play and then we&#39;re going to do this event afterward and I know a couple weeks before we&#39;re going to do this event someone at the White House calls and says um listen it&#39;s very unusual to get the president for like 6 and 1 half hours so we&#39;re suggesting that the president come and see the First Act and then he goes and I knew what was happening now first of all Clinton knows this play he knows what this play is about and I you know as gently as I could said well if the president is thinking of leaving at intermission then I&#39;m afraid we&#39;re going to have to cancel the event there&#39;s just no way that so anyway then oh no it&#39;s fine it&#39;s fine now I know what was happening what was happening was that someone had read the play and they were quite concerned and I&#39;ll tell you why because the play is about this character that I uh portrayed named hickey and in the course of the play as things get more and more revealed you realize that this man that I&#39;m playing has been a philanderer and he&#39;s cheated on his wife quite a lot and by the end of the play he is arrested and taken off because he ended up ending his wife&#39;s life because she she forgave him too much and he couldn&#39;t live with it mhm so now imagine this there&#39;s 2,000 people at the brookson theater watching President Clinton watching this play and at the end of the night we take our Curtain Call they bring out the presidential Podium Bill Clinton stands up there and he says well I suppose we should all thank Kevin and this extraordinary company of actors for giving us all way too much to think [Laughter] about and the audience fell over in laughter and then he gave a great speech and I thought that was a pretty good way to handle that well in that way him and Frank Underwood share like a Charisma there&#39;s certain presidents that just have politicians that just have this Charisma you can&#39;t stop listening to them some of it is the accent but some of it is some other magical thing when I uh was starting to do research um I wanted to meet with the whip Kevin McCarthy and uh he wouldn&#39;t meet with me till I called his office back and said tell him I&#39;m playing a Democrat not a Republican and then he met with me nice and he was helpful he he took me to whip meetings politicians uh so you worked with David Fincher there he uh he was the executive producer but he also directed The the first two episodes yeah high level what was it like working with him again uh in which ways do you think he helped guide you in the show to become the great show that it was I I give him uh a huge amount of um the credit and not just for what he established but the fact that every director after stayed within that world I think that&#39;s why the series had a very consistent feeling to it it was like watching a very long movie the style where the camera went what it did what it didn&#39;t do how we used this how we used that how we didn&#39;t do this there were there were things that he laid the foundation for that we managed to maintain pretty much until uh bo Willman left the show they got rid of Fincher and I was sort of the last man standing in terms of fighting again Netflix had never had any creative control at all we had complete creative control but over time they started to get themselves involved because look this is what happens to networks you know they never made a television show before ever and then four years later they they were the best and so you know then you&#39;re going to get suggestions about casting and about writing and about who music and scenes and so there was there was a a considerable amount of a push back that I had to do when they started to get involved in ways that I thought was affecting the quality of the show what are those battles like like I heard that there was a battle of the exacts like you mentioned early on about your name not being on the billing for seven I heard that there&#39;s battles about the ending of seven which was really um well it&#39;s it&#39;s was pretty dark so what&#39;s that battle like how often does that happen and how do you win that battle like cuz it feels like there&#39;s line where the networks or the the execs are really afraid of Crossing that line into this strange uncomfortable place and then the the director great directors and great actors kind of flirt with that line it can happen in different ways I mean I remember one uh uh argument we had was we had specifically shot a scene so that there would be no score in that scene so that there was no music it was just two people talking and then we end up seeing a cut where they&#39;ve decided to put music in and it is against everything that scene&#39;s supposed to be about and you have to go and say guys this was intentional we did not want score and now you&#39;ve added score because what you think it&#39;s too quiet you think an our audience can&#39;t listen to two people talk for two and a half minutes with this show has proved anything it&#39;s proved that people have patience and their willing to watch an entire season over a weekend um so there are those kind of uh arguments that can happen um you know there&#39;s there&#39;s the the different different arguments on different levels and and they sometimes have to do with I mean look go back to the Godfather they wanted to fire Pacino because they didn&#39;t see anything happening they saw nothing happening so they wanted to fire Pacino and then finally Copa thought I&#39;ll shoot the scene where he kills the police Poli commissioner and and they&#39;ll do that scene now and that was the first scene where they went yeah actually there&#39;s something going on there so Pacino kept the role you think that Godfathers when Pacino was like the Pacino we know was born or is that more like there&#39;s the character the Really Over the Top incen a woman there&#39;s like stages I suppose yeah of course look I think that we we can&#39;t forget that Pacino is also an animal of the theater you know he does a lot of plays and he started off doing plays and you know movies were you know panic and needle Park was his first um and yeah I think there&#39;s that period of time when he was doing some incredible Parts Incredible movies when I did a series called wise guy I got cast on a Thursday and I flew up to Vancouver on a Saturday I started shooting on Monday and all I had time to do was watch The Godfather and Serpico and then I went to work [Laughter] would you say ridiculous question Godfather greatest film of all time well certainly certainly yes yes um but I also look I I&#39;m I&#39;m allowed to change my opinion I can next week say it&#39;s Lawrence of Arabia or a week after that I can say um Sullivan travels I mean that&#39;s the wonderful thing about movies and particularly great movies is when you see them again it&#39;s like seeing them for the first time and you pick up things that you didn&#39;t see the last time and and for that day you fall in love with that movie you might even say uh to a friend that that is the greatest movie of all time and also I think it&#39;s the it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s the degree with which directors are daring I mean kubric decided to cast one actor to play three major roles in Doctor Strange Love I mean who who has the balls to do that today I was going to mention when we&#39;re talking about seven that just if if you&#39;re if you&#39;re looking at the greatest performances portrayals of murderers so obviously like I mentioned Han elector and Silence of the Lambs that&#39;s up there seven to me is like competing for first place with Silence of the Lambs but then there&#39;s a different one uh with kubri and Jack Nicholson right with Shin with The Shining and there&#39;s um as opposed to a murderer who&#39;s always been a murderer here&#39;s a person like in American Beauty who becomes that who descends into madness yeah I I read also that Jack dingon improvised here&#39;s Johnny in that scene I believe that that&#39;s a very different performance than yours in seven what uh what do you make of that performance Nicholson&#39;s always been such an incredible actor because he has absolutely no shame about being demonstrative and over the-top and he also has no problem charact playing characters who are deeply flawed and he&#39;s interested in that I have a pretty good Nicholson story though nobody nobody knows you also have a pretty good uh Nicholson impression but what&#39;s the story story is um story was told to me by a sound man Dennis maitlin who&#39;s a great great great guy he said he uh he was very excited because he he got on PR&#39;s honor which was Jack Nicholson Angelic Houston directed by John Houston and he said I was so excited it&#39;s my first day on the movie and I get told to go into Mr Nicholson&#39;s trailer and mic him up for the first scene so I knock on the trailer door and I hear yes and uh come on in and I come inside Mr Nicholson is changing out of his regular clothes and he&#39;s putting on he&#39;s going to put on his costume and so I&#39;m setting up the mic and I&#39;m getting ready and I said Mr Nicholson I I just wanted to tell you I&#39;m I&#39;m extremely excited to be working with you again it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s a great pleasure and Jack goes did we work together before and he says yes yes we uh we did he what what film did we do together he says uh well we did U Missouri breaks Nicholson goes oh my God Missouri breaks Jesus Christ we were out of our minds on that film holy shit Jesus Christ it&#39;s wonder I&#39;m alive my god there was so much drugs going on and we were stoned out of our minds holy shit just then he folds the pants that he&#39;s just taken off over his arm and an eighth of coke drops out on the floor Dennis looks at it Nicholson looks at it Jack goes haven&#39;t worn these pants since Missouri braks man I love that guy unapologetically himself oh yeah your impression of him like at the AFI was just it just great well that was for that was for Mike Nichols oh yeah he had a big impact in your career huge can you talk about him like what what role did he play in your life I think it was uh yeah it was 1984 I went into audition for the national tour of a play called the real thing which Jeremy Irons and Glen Close were doing on Broadway that Mr Nichols had directed so I went in to read for this character bro who is a Scottish character and I did the audition and uh Mike Nichols comes down the aisle of the theater and he&#39;s asking me questions about where did you go to school and what have you been doing and I just come back from doing a bunch of years of regional theater and different theaters so I was in New York and meeting Mike Nicholls was just incredible so Mr Nichols went um have you um have you seen the other play that I directed up the block called Hurley Burley and I said no I haven&#39;t he says why not I said I can&#39;t afford a Broadway ticket he said we can arrange that I&#39;d like you to go see that play and then I&#39;d like you to come in next week and audition for that and I was like okay so I went to see hurle Burley William Hurt Harvick Kel Chris walin Candace Bergen Cynthia Nixon Jerry Stiller and I watched this play it&#39;s play David Ray play about Hollywood this is crazy I mean Bill hurt was like unbelievable and it was Extraordinary Chris wer so this&#39;s this harvi Kel won came in later harv Kel&#39;s playing this part and uh I come in on I audition for it and Nicholls says I want you to uh understudy Harvey kitel I want you to understudy Phil and I&#39;m like Phil I mean Harvey Cel is like in his 40s he looks like he can beat the shit out everybody on stage I&#39;m this like 20 foury old and Nicholls said it&#39;s just all about attitude if you believe you can beat the shit on everybody on stage the audience will too okay so I then started to learn Phil and the way it works when you&#39;re in understudy unless you&#39;re a name they don&#39;t let you rehearse on the stage you just in a rehearsal room but I used to sneak onto the stage and rehearse and try to figure out where the props were and yada y anyway one day I get a call you&#39;re going on today it&#39;s Phil so I went on Nicholls is told by Peter Lawrence who&#39;s the stage manager Spacey&#39;s going on as Phil so Nicholls comes down and watches the second act comes backstage he says that was really good how soon could you learn Mickey Mickey was the role that Ron Silver was playing that uh Chris Walkin also played I said I I don&#39;t I don&#39;t know I maybe a couple weeks he goes learn Mickey too so I I learned Mickey and then one day I&#39;m told you&#39;re going on tomorrow night is Mickey Nicholls comes sees the second act comes backstage says that was really good I mean that was really funny how soon could you learn Eddie and so I became like the pinch hitter on Hurley Burley I learned all the male parts including Jerry Stillers although I never went on is Jerry Stillers part and then I left the play and I guess about two months later I get this phone call from Mike Nichols he&#39;s like Kevin how are you and I&#39;m like I&#39;m fine what what can I do for you he says well I&#39;m going to make a film this summer with Mandy and Merill and there&#39;s a role I&#39;d like you to come in and and uh an audition for so I I went in auditioned cast me as this Mugger on a subway then there&#39;s this whole upheaval that happens because he then doesn&#39;t continue with Mandy pkin Mandy leaves the movie and he asks Jack Nicholson to come in and replace Mandy pimkin so now I had no scenes with him but I&#39;m in a movie with Jack Nicholson and Merl Streep and my first scene in this movie which I shot on my birthday July 26th of 85 um I got to wink at Merill Street uh in this scene and I I was so nervous I I literally couldn&#39;t wink Nicholls had to like calm me down and help me wink um but that became my first my very first film um and he was incredible and he let me come and watch when they were shooting scenes I wasn&#39;t in um and I remember ending up one day in the makeup trailer on the same day we were working Jack and me we had no scene together but I remember him coming in and they put him down in the chair and they put cucumbers frozen cucumbers on his eyes and did his neck and then they raised him up and did his face and then I remember Nicholson went like this looked in the mirror and he went [Applause] another day another $50,000 and walked out of the trailer well what was Christopher Walkin like a so he&#39;s a he&#39;s a theater guy too oh yeah he started out as a chorus boy dancer well I can see that yeah the guy I&#39;ve known walking a long time and I did a center at live where I did um we did these Star Wars auditions so I did Chris Walkin as as Hans so so good and uh I&#39;ll never forget this I was in Los Angeles about two weeks after and I was at chatow maral there&#39;s some party happening at chatow maral and I saw Chris walan come out of onto the balcony and I was like oh shit it&#39;s Chris Walkin and he walked up to and he went gevin I saw you little sketch it was funny haha oh man it was a really good sketch and that guy there&#39;s certain people that are truly unique and Unapologetic continue being that throughout their whole career the way they talk the musicality of how they talk how they are their way of being he&#39;s that yeah and and it somehow Works watch yeah and I mean he works in so many different cont his he plays like a mobster in True Romance mhm and it&#39;s like genius that&#39;s genius but he could he could be anything he could be soft he could be a badass all of it and he&#39;s so Christopher walking but somehow works for all these different characters so I guess we were talking about House of Cards like two hours ago before we uh took a tangent upon a tangent but there&#39;s a moment in episode one where president Walker broke his promise to Frank Underwood that he would make him a secretary of state was this when the monster in Frank was born or was the monster was there the sort of for you looking at that character was there an idealistic notion to him that there&#39;s loyalty and that broke him or did he always know that there is this this whole world is about manipulation and do anything to get power well I mean it might have been the first moment an audience saw him be betrayed but it certainly was not the first betrayal he&#39; experienced and once you start to get to know him and learn about his life and learn about his father and learn about his you know friends and learn about their relationship and learn what he was like even as a Cadet I think you start to realize that this is a man who has um very strong beliefs about loyalty and so wasn&#39;t the first it was just the first moment that in terms of the storyline that&#39;s being built night takes King was the name of our production company yeah uh what do you think motivated him at that moment and throughout the show was it all about power and also Legacy or was there some small part underneath at all where he wanted to actually do good in the world no I I think power is a is a afterthought what he loved more than anything was being able to predict how human beings would react he was a behavioral psychologist and he could know like he was 17 moves ahead in a chess game he could know if he did this at this moment that eventually this would happen he was able to be predictive and was usually right he knew just how far he needed to push someone to get them to do what he needed them to do in order to make make the next step work you&#39;ve played a bunch of evil characters well you call them evil but you don&#39;t but but my the reason I say that I don&#39;t mean to be snarky about it but the reason I say it that way is because I never judge the people I play and the people that I have played or that any actor has played don&#39;t necessarily view themselves as this label it&#39;s easy to say but that&#39;s not the way I can think I cannot judge a character I play and then play them well I have to be free of judgment I have to just play them and let the cards drop where they where they may and let an audience judge I mean the fact that you use that word perfectly fine that&#39;s your you know but it&#39;s like people asking me you know was I really from kpack or not you know it&#39;s just entirely depends on your perspective do roles like that like seven like Frank Underwood like uh lesser from American Beauty they change you psychologically as a person so walking around in the skin of these characters these complex characters with a ve very different moral systems um I absolutely believe that wandering around in someone else&#39;s ideas in someone else&#39;s clothes in someone else&#39;s shoes teaches you enormous empathy and and that goes to the heart of not judging and I have found that I have been so moved by I mean look let&#39;s yes you you&#39;ve identified the darker characters but I put Clarence Darrow three times I&#39;ve played a play called national anthems I&#39;ve done movies like recount I&#39;ve done films like the ref I&#39;ve done films that in which there are that isn&#39;t that doesn&#39;t exist in any of those characters that those qualities paid forward um and so it is um incredible to be able to embrace those things that I admire and that are are like me and those things that I don&#39;t admire and aren&#39;t like me but I have to put them on an equal footing and say I have to just play them as best I can and not um decide to wield judgment over them without judgment without judgment in Gulag archipelago Alexander soier niten famously writes about the line between good and evil and that it runs to the heart of every man so the the full paragraph there when he talks about the line during the life of any heart this line keeps changing Place sometimes it is squeezed One Way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish one and the same human being is at various ages under various circumstances a totally different human being at times he is close to being a devil at times to sainthood but his name doesn&#39;t change and to that name we ascribe the whole lot good and evil uh what do you think about this note uh that we&#39;re all capable of Good and Evil and throughout life that line moves and shifts throughout the day throughout every hour M yeah I mean um one of the things that I&#39;ve been focused on um very succinctly is the idea that every day is an opportunity it&#39;s an opportunity to make better decisions to learn and to grow um and I also think that look I I grew up not knowing if my parents loved me particularly my father I I never had a sense that I was loved and that stayed with me my whole life and when I think back at who my father was and more succinctly who he became it was a gr gradual and slow and sad development when I&#39;ve gone back and now I&#39;ve looked at um Diaries my father kept and albums he kept particularly when he was a medic in the US Army served our country with distinction when the war was over and they went to Germany the things my father said the things that he wrote the things that he believed were as patriotic as any American soldier who had ever served but then when he came back to America and he had a dream of being a journalist or his big Hope was that he was going to be the Great American novelist he wanted to be a creative novelist and so he sat in his office and he wrote for 45 years and never published anything and somewhere along the way in order to make money he became what they call a technical procedure writer which which the best way to describe that is that if you built the F-16 aircraft my father would have written a manual to tell you how to do it I mean as boring as technical as tedious as you can imagine and so somewhere in the 60s and into the 70s my father fell in with groups of people and individuals pretend intellectuals who started to give him reasons why he was not successful as a white Aryan man in the United States and over time my father became a white supremacist and I cannot tell you the amount of times as a young boy that my father would sit me down and lecture me for hours and hours and hours about his fucked up ideas of America of prejudice of white supremacy and thank God for my sister who said Don&#39;t listen to a thing he says he&#39;s out of his mind and even though I was young I knew everything he was saying was against people and I I loved people I had so many wonderful friends my best friend Mike who&#39;s still my close friend to this day I was afraid to bring him to my house because I was afraid that my father would find out he was Jewish or that my father would leave his office door open and some of them would see his Nazi flag or his pictures of Hitler or Nazi books or what he might say so when I found theater in the e8th grade and Debate Club and choir and festivals and plays and everything I could do to participate in that wouldn&#39;t make me have to come back home I did and I&#39;ve had to reconcile who he became because the between that man who was in the US Army as a medic and the man he became I could never fill that Gap but I forgiven him but then at the same time I&#39;ve had to look at my mother and say she made excuses for him oh he just needs to get it off his chest oh it doesn&#39;t matter just let him say so while on the outside I would say oh yeah my mother loved me but she didn&#39;t protect me so was the was all the stuff that she expressed and and all of the attention and all the the the love that I felt was that because I became successful and I was able to fulfill an emptiness that she&#39;d lived with her whole life with him I don&#39;t know but I I&#39;ve had to ask myself those questions over these last years um to try to reconcile that for myself and the thing you wanted from them and for them is less hate and more love did your dad said he he loves you I I don&#39;t have any memory of that I was in a program and I they were showing us um an experiment that they done with psychologists and mothers and fathers and their children and the children were anywhere between 6 months and a year sitting in a little crib and the exercise was this parents are playing with the baby right there Toys yada y baby&#39;s laughing at and then the psychologist would say stop and the parent would go like this and you would then watch for the next two and a half three minutes this child trying to get their parents&#39; attention in any possible way and I remember when I was sitting in this theater watching this I saw myself that was me screaming and reaching out and trying to get my parents&#39; attention that was me and that was uh not something I I&#39;d ever remembered before but I I knew that what that baby was going through is there some elements of uh politics and maybe the private sector that uh are captured by the by a house of cards like how how true to life do you think that is from everything you&#39;ve seen about politics from everything You&#39; seen about uh the politicians of this particular elections I heard so many different reactions from politicians about House of Cards some would say oh it&#39;s not like that at all and then others would say it&#39;s closer to the truth than anyone wants to admit and I think I fall down in the side of that idea I have to interview some more world leaders some big politicians in your understanding of trying to become Frank hwood what advice would you give in interviewing Frank hwood how do how do get him to say anything that&#39;s at all honest well in Frank&#39;s case all you have to do is tell him to look into the camera and he&#39;ll tell you he&#39;ll tell you what you want to hear secret unfortunately we don&#39;t get that look into the the mind of a person the way we do with Frank Underwood in real life sadly well but you could say to somebody you like the series House of Cards you know I&#39;d love for you to just look into the camera and tell us what&#39;s really going on what you really feel about blah blah blah that&#39;s a good technique I&#39;ll I&#39;ll try that with zalinski and with Putin um what do you hope your legacy as an actor is and and as a human being people ask me now what&#39;s your favorite performance you&#39;ve ever given and my answer is I haven&#39;t given it yet so um there&#39;s a lot more that I want to be challenged by be inspired by um there&#39;s a lot that I don&#39;t know there&#39;s a lot I have to learn um and that is very exciting place to feel that I&#39;m in I you know it&#39;s been interesting because you know we&#39;re we&#39;re going back we&#39;re talking and you know it&#39;s it&#39;s nice to go back every now and then but I&#39;m focused on on what&#39;s next do you hope the world World forgives you people go to church every week to be forgiven and I believe that forgiveness and I believe that Redemption are beautiful things I mean look don&#39;t forget I I live in an industry in which there is a tremendous amount of conversation about Redemption from a lot of people who are very serious people in very serious positions who who believe in it I mean that guy finally got out of prison he was wrongly accused that guy who served his time and got out of prison we see so many people saying let&#39;s find a path for that person Let&#39;s help that person rejoin Society but there is an odd situation if you&#39;re in the entertainment industry you&#39;re not offered that kind of a path and I hope that the fear that people are experiencing will eventually subside and Common Sense will get back to the table if it does do you think you have another Oscar worthy performance in you listen if it would piss off Jack Lemon again for me to win a third time I absolutely think so yeah well you have to mention him again you know Ernest way once said that the world is a fine place and worth fighting for and uh I agree with him on both counts Kevin thank you so much for talking today thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with Kevin spacy to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Merill stre acting is not about being someone different it&#39;s finding the similarity in what is apparently different and then finding myself in there thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

the following is a conversation with Kevin spacy a two-time Oscar winning actor who has starred in seven The Usual Suspects American Beauty and House of Cards he is one of the greatest actors ever creating haunting performances of characters who often embody the Dark Side of human nature 7 years ago he was cut from House of Cards and cancelled by Hollywood in the world when Anthony rap made an allegation that Kevin spacy sexually abused in 1986 Anthony rap then filed a civil lawsuit seeking $40 million in this trial and all civil and criminal trials that followed Kevin was acquitted he has never been found guilty nor liable in the court of law in this conversation Kevin makes clear what he did and what he didn&amp;#39;t do I also encourage you to listen to Kevin&amp;#39;s Dan Wooten and Allison Pearson interviews for additional details and responses to the allegations as an aside let me say that one of the principles I operate under for this podcast and in life is that I will talk with everyone with empathy and with backbone for each guest I hope to explore their life&amp;#39;s work life&amp;#39;s story and what and how they think and do so on honestly and fully The Good the Bad and the Ugly the Brilliance and the flaws I won&amp;#39;t whitewash their sins but I won&amp;#39;t reduce them to a worst possible caricature of their sins either the latter is what the mass hysteria of Internet mobs too often does often rushing to a final judgment before the facts are in I will try to do better than that to respect due process in service of the truth and I hope to have the courage to always think independently and to speak honestly from the heart even when the eyes of the outrage mob are on me again my goal is to understand human beings at their best and at their worst and hope is such understanding leads to more compassion and wisdom in the world I will make mistakes and when I do I will work hard to improve I love you all this is the Lex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here&amp;#39;s Kevin spacy you played a serial killer in the movie 7 your performance was one of if not the greatest portrayal of a murderer on screen ever what was your process of becoming him John Doe the serial killer the truth is I didn&amp;#39;t get the part um I had been in Los Angeles making a couple of films swimming of sharks and Usual Suspects and then I did a film called outbreak that Morgan Freeman was in and I went into audition for David Fincher in probably late November of 94 and I audition for this part and didn&amp;#39;t get it and I went back to New York and I think they started shooting like December 12th and I&amp;#39;m in New York I&amp;#39;m back in my I have a wonderful apartment on West 12th Street and my mom has come to visit for Christmas and it&amp;#39;s December 23rd and it&amp;#39;s like 7:00 at night and my phone rings and it&amp;#39;s Arnold son who&amp;#39;s the producer of seven and he&amp;#39;s very jovial and he&amp;#39;s very friendly and he says how you doing and I said fine and he said listen do you remember that film you came in 47 I said yeah yeah absolutely he goes Well turns out that uh we hired an actor and we started shooting and then yesterday David fired him and David would like you to get on a plane on Sunday and come to Los Angeles and start shooting on Tuesday and I was like okay would it be imposing to say Can can I read it again because it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s been a while now and I&amp;#39;d like to so they send a script over I read the script that night I thought about it um and I I had this feeling I I I I I can&amp;#39;t even quite describe it but I had this feeling that it would be really good if I didn&amp;#39;t take billing in the film and the reason I felt that was because I knew that by the time this film would come out it would be the last one of the three movies that I just shot the fourth one and if any of those Films Broke through or did well if it was going to be Brad pit Morgan Freeman gwenth palro and Kevin spy and you don&amp;#39;t show up for the first 25 30 40 minutes people going to figure out who you&amp;#39;re playing so people should know that you are the serial you play the serial killer in the movie and serial killer shows up like more than halfway through the mie very late and when you say billing is like the posters the VHS cover everything you&amp;#39;re gone you&amp;#39;re not there not there and so new line Cinema uh told me to go fuck myself um that they absolutely could use my picture and my image and this became a little bit of a I&amp;#39;d say 24hour conversation and it was Fincher who said I actually think this is a really cool idea so the compromise was I&amp;#39;m the first credit at the end of the movie when the credits start so I got on a plane on that Sunday and I flew to Los Angeles and I went into where they were shooting and I went into the makeup room and David Fincher was there and we were talking about what should I do how should I how should I look and I just had my hair short for outbreak cuz I was playing a military uh character and I just looked at the hairdresser and I said do you have a razor and finer went are you kidding I said no he goes if you shave your head I&amp;#39;ll shave mine so we both shaved our heads and then I started shooting the next day so my long-winded answer to your question is that I didn&amp;#39;t have that much time to think about how to build that character what I think in the end Fincher was able to do so brilliantly with such Terror was to set the audience up to meet this character I think the the last scene the ending scene and the car ride leading up to it where it&amp;#39;s mostly on you in conversation with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pit it&amp;#39;s one of the greatest scenes in film history so people somehow didn&amp;#39;t see the movie there&amp;#39;s these five murders that happen that are inspired by five of the seven deadly sins and the the ending scene is inspired represents the last two deadly sins and there&amp;#39;s this calm subtlety uh about you in your performance it&amp;#39;s just terrifying maybe in contrast with Brad Pit performance that&amp;#39;s also really strong but that the contrast in the contrast is the terrifying uh sense that you get in the audience that builds up to The Twist at the end or the surprise at the end with the famous what&amp;#39;s in the box from Brad Pit right that is Brad Pitt&amp;#39;s character&amp;#39;s wife her head yeah I I I can really only tell you that while we were shooting that scene in the car while we were out in the in the desert in that place where all those electrical wires were David just kept saying less do less um and I just tried to I mean he I remember he kept saying to me remember you&amp;#39;re in control like you&amp;#39;re going to win and knowing that should allow you to have tremendous confidence and I just followed that lead and I I just think it&amp;#39;s the kind of film that so many of the elements that had been at work from the beginning of the movie in terms of its style in terms of how he built this Terror in terms of how he built for the audience a sense of this person being one of the scariest people they might ever encounter um is it really allowed me to be able to not have to do that much just say the words and mean them and I think it also is it&amp;#39;s an example of what makes tragedy so um difficult I mean you know very often tragedy is people operating without enough information they don&amp;#39;t have all the facts Romy and Juliet they don&amp;#39;t have all the facts they don&amp;#39;t know what we know as an audience and so in the the end whether Brad Pitt&amp;#39;s character ends up shooting John Doe or turning the gun on himself which was a discussion I mean there were there were a number of alternative endings that were discussed um nothing ends up being tied up in a nice little bow it is complicated and shows how nobody wins in the end when you&amp;#39;re not operating with all the information when you say say the words and mean them what does mean them mean I&amp;#39;ve uh I&amp;#39;ve been very fortunate to be directed by Fincher a couple of times and um he would say to me sometimes I don&amp;#39;t believe a thing that is coming out of your mouth shall we try it again and you go okay yeah we can try it again and sometimes he&amp;#39;ll do take and then you&amp;#39;ll look to see if he has any added um genius to to to hand you and he just goes let&amp;#39;s do it again and then let&amp;#39;s do it again and some sometimes I I I say this in all humility he&amp;#39;s literally trying to beat the acting out of you and and and by continually saying do it again do it again do it again and not giving you any specifics he&amp;#39;s he is he is systematically shredding you of all pretense of all you know cuz look very often you know actors we come in on the set and we&amp;#39;ve thought about the scene and we&amp;#39;ve worked out you know I&amp;#39;ve got this prop and I&amp;#39;m going to do this thing with a can I&amp;#39;m you know all these thing all the tea I&amp;#39;m going to do a thing with the thing that and and David is the kind of director where he just wants you to stop adding all that crap and just say the words and say them quickly and mean them and it takes a while to get to that place I I&amp;#39;ll tell you a story this is a story I just love because it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s in the exactly the same wheelhouse so Jack lemon&amp;#39;s first movie was a film called it should happen to you and was directed by George cuer and Jack tells this story and it was just an incredibly Charming story to hear Jack tell he said so I I I&amp;#39;m doing his picture and let me tell you I this is a terrific part for me and I&amp;#39;m doing a scene it&amp;#39;s on my first day it&amp;#39;s my first day and it&amp;#39;s a terrific scene and he goes we we do the first take and and and George cuer comes up to me and he says Jack I said yeah he said could you do let&amp;#39;s do another one but just do a little less uh in in this one and Jack said a little a little less a little less than what I just did he said yeah just a little less so he goes we do another take and and I think boy that was it I mean let&amp;#39;s let&amp;#39;s just go home and uh cuer walked up to it and said Jack i&amp;#39; let&amp;#39;s do another one this time just a little bit less and Jack said let less than what I just did now he said yeah just a little bit less he goes oh okay so he did another take and cuer came up and he said Jack just a little bit less and Jack said a little less than what I just did he said yes he go well if I do any less I&amp;#39;m not going to be acting and cuer said exactly Jack exactly I mean I guess what you&amp;#39;re saying is it&amp;#39;s extremely difficult to get to the the bottom of a little less because the power if we just stick even on seven of your performance is in the tiniest of subtleties like when you say oh you didn&amp;#39;t know and you turn your head a little bit and a little bit like the the little bit maybe a glimmer of a smile appears on your face that&amp;#39;s subtlety that&amp;#39;s less that&amp;#39;s hard to get to I I suppose yeah and also because I I I I so well remember I think the work that Brad did in and also Morgan did in that scene but the work that Brad had to do where he had to go I remember rehearsing with him as we were all staying at this little hotel nearby that location and we rehearsed the night before we started shooting that sequence and I just I mean it was just incredible to see the levels of emotions he had to go through and then the decision of what do I do because if I do what he wants me to do then he wins but if I don&amp;#39;t do it then I&amp;#39;m what kind of a man husband am I uh I just thought he did really incredible work so it was also not easy to not react to to the to the power of what he was throwing at me um I just thought it was an extraordinary um a really extraordinary scene so what&amp;#39;s it like being in that scene so it&amp;#39;s you Brad Pit Morgan Freeman and Brad Pit is going over the top just having a mental breakdown and is weighing these extremely difficult moral choices as you&amp;#39;re saying but he&amp;#39;s like screaming and in pain and tormented while you&amp;#39;re very subtly smiling in terms of the writing and in terms of what the characters had to do was it was incredible culmination of how this character um could manipulate in the way that he did and and in the end succeed you mentioned Fincher likes to do a lot of takes that&amp;#39;s the the famous thing about David Fincher so what are the pros and cons of that I think I I read that he does some crazy amount he averages 25 to 65 uh takes and most directors do less than 10 so yeah sometimes it&amp;#39;s timing sometimes it&amp;#39;s literally he has a stopwatch and he&amp;#39;s he&amp;#39;s timing how long a scene is taking and then he&amp;#39;ll say you need to take a minute off this scene like a minute yeah a minute off this scene I want it to move like this so let&amp;#39;s pick it up let&amp;#39;s pick up the pace let&amp;#39;s take let&amp;#39;s see if we can take a minute off why the speed why why say it fast is the important thing for you think I think because Fincher hates Indulgence and he wants he wants people to talk the way they do in life which is you know we don&amp;#39;t take big dramatic pauses yeah right you know before we speak we speak we say what we want we you know and I guess actors like the dramatic pauses and the the the indulge in the dramatic they didn&amp;#39;t always like the dramatic pauses I mean look you didn&amp;#39;t want to you go back any student of acting you go back to the 30s and the 40s 50s the speed at which actors spoke not just in the comedies which of course you know you look at any Preston Sturges movie and it&amp;#39;s incredible how fast people are talking and how and how funny things are when they happen that fast um but then you know acting Styles changed we got into a different kind of thing in the late 50s and 60s and and uh you know a lot of actors are feeling it which is I&amp;#39;m not saying it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s a it&amp;#39;s a bad thing it&amp;#39;s just that if you want to keep an audience engaged as Fincher does and I believe successfully does in all of his work um Pace timing movement Clarity speed are admirable to achieve and all of that he wants the actor to be as natural as possible to strip away all the bullshit of acting and become human look lucky with other directors Sam mes is similar I remember when I walked in to maybe the first rehearsal for Richard III that we were doing and I had brought with me a a canopy of of ailments that my Richard was going to suffer from uh and uh Sam you know eventually whittled it down to like three like maybe your arm and maybe thing and maybe your leg but let&amp;#39;s get rid of the other 10 things that you brought into the room because I was you know I was so excited to you know capture this character so you know very often uh Trevor nun is this way a lot a lot of wonderful directors I&amp;#39;ve worked with they&amp;#39;re really good at helping you trim and edit David Fincher said about you he was talking in general I think but also specifically in the moment of hos cars said that you have exceptional skill both as an actor and as a performer former which he says are different things so he defines the former as dramatization of a text and the latter as the seduction of an audience do you see uh wisdom in that distinction and what does it take to do both the dramatization of a text and the seduction of an audience those are two very interesting descriptions um when I think I guess when I think performer I tend to think entertaining I tend to think uh I tend to think comedy I tend to think winning over an audience I tend to think um that there&amp;#39;s something about um that quality of wanting to of wanting to have people enjoy themselves um and when you saddle that against what maybe he means as an actor which is which is which is which is more dramatic or more more text driven more um look I&amp;#39;ve I&amp;#39;ve always believed that my that my job not every actor feels this way but my job the way that I&amp;#39;ve looked at it is that my job is to serve the writing and that if I serve the writing I will in a sense serve myself because I&amp;#39;ll be in the right World I&amp;#39;ll be in the right context I&amp;#39;ll be in the right style I I I&amp;#39;ll I&amp;#39;ll have embraced what a director&amp;#39;s you know um it&amp;#39;s not my painting it&amp;#39;s someone else&amp;#39;s painting I&amp;#39;m a series of colors and someone else&amp;#39;s painting and the barometer for me has always been that when people stop me and talk to me about a character I&amp;#39;ve played and reference their name as if they actually exist that&amp;#39;s when I feel like I&amp;#39;ve gotten close to doing my job yeah one of the challenges for me in this conversation is remembering that your name is Kevin not Frank or John or any of these characters because they live deeply in the psyche to me that&amp;#39;s the greatest that&amp;#39;s the greatest um um compliment for me as an actor um I I I love being able to go I mean when I think about performers who inspire me and I remember when I was young and I was introduced to Spencer Tracy Henry Fonda Katherine heern I just I believed who they were I knew nothing about them they were just these extraordinary characters doing this extraordinary stuff and then I think more um recently contemporary when I think of the work that Philip seamour Hoffman did and Heath Ledger and people that that when I think about what they could be doing what they could do what they would have done had they stayed with us um I&amp;#39;m so ex I&amp;#39;m so excited when I when I go into a cinema or I go into play and I completely am taken to some place that I believe exists and characters that that become real and those characters become like lifelong companions like for me they travel with you and even if it&amp;#39;s the darkest aspects of human nature they&amp;#39;re always there it&amp;#39;s they almost like I feel like I almost met them and gotten to know them and gotten to become like friends with them almost Hannibal Lecter whether it&amp;#39;s the or or Force Gump mhm I mean I&amp;#39;ve I feel like I&amp;#39;m like best friends with for for Gump I know the guy and I guess he&amp;#39;s played by some guy named Tom but like force Gump is the the guy I&amp;#39;m friends with yeah and I think that everybody feels like that when they&amp;#39;re in the audience with great characters they just kind of they become part of you in some some way the dark the The Good the Bad and the Ugly of them one of the things that I that I feel that I try to do uh in my work is when I read something for the first time when I read a script or a play and I am absolutely devastated by it it is it is the most extraordinary the most beautiful the most life affirming or terrifying it&amp;#39;s then a process weirdly of working backwards because I want to work in such a way that that&amp;#39;s the experience I give to the audience when they first see it that they have the experience I had when I read it I remember that there&amp;#39;s been times in the creative process when something was pointed out to me or something was I I I I remember I was doing a play and I was having this really tough time with a one of the last scenes in the play and I just couldn&amp;#39;t figure it out I was in rehearsal and although we had a director in that play I I called another a friend of mine who was also director and I and I had him come over and I said look this scene I&amp;#39;m just having the toughest I cannot seem to crack this scene and so we we read it through a couple of times and then this this wonderful director named John swanbeck who would eventually direct me in a film called the Big Kahuna but this is before that um he said to me the most incredible thing he just said um all right what&amp;#39;s the last line you have in this scene before you fall over and fall asleep and I said the last line is a that last drink the old KO and he went okay I want you to think about what that line actually means and then work backwards and so he left and I sort of was left with this what like what does that mean how am I supposed to and then like a couple of days went by a couple of days went by and I thought okay so said what is that line actually mean well that last drink the old ko ko is knockout which is a boxing term it&amp;#39;s the only boxing term the writer uses in the play and then I went back and I realized my friend was so smart and so incredible to have you know said ask a question you haven&amp;#39;t thought of asking yet I realized that the playwright wrote the last round the eighth round between these two brothers and it was a fight physical as well as emotional and when I brought that into the rehearsal room to the director was doing that play he liked that idea and we staged that scene as if it was the eighth round although audience wouldn&amp;#39;t have known that but just what I loved about that was that somebody said to me ask yourself a question you haven&amp;#39;t asked yourself yet what does that line mean and then work backwards what is that like a a catalyst for thinking deeply about what is magical about this play this story this narrative that that&amp;#39;s what that is like thinking backwards that&amp;#39;s what that does yeah and but also because it&amp;#39;s just it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s this incredible why didn&amp;#39;t I think to ask that question myself that&amp;#39;s what you have directors for that&amp;#39;s what you have you know so many places where ideas can come from um but that just illustrates that even though in my brain I go I always like to work backwards I I missed it in that one and I&amp;#39;m very grateful to my to my friend for having pushed me into being able to realize what that meant and to ask the interesting question the I like the the poetry and the humility of I&amp;#39;m just a series of colors in someone else&amp;#39;s painting that was a good line uh that said you&amp;#39;ve talked about improvisation you said that it&amp;#39;s all about the ability to do it again and again again and again and yet never make it the same and you also just said that you you&amp;#39;re trying to stay true to the text so where&amp;#39;s the room for the improvisation that it&amp;#39;s never the same well there&amp;#39;s two slightly different contexts I think one is in the rehearsal room um improvisation could be a wonderful device I mean Sam meny for example will will start uh he&amp;#39;ll start a scene and he he does this wonderful thing he brings rugs and he brings chairs and Sofas in and he says well let&amp;#39;s let&amp;#39;s put let&amp;#39;s put two chairs here and here you guys let&amp;#39;s start in these chairs far apart from each other let&amp;#39;s see what happens with the scene if if you&amp;#39;re that far apart and so we&amp;#39;ll do the scene that way and then he goes okay um let&amp;#39;s bring a rug in and let&amp;#39;s bring these chairs much closer and let&amp;#39;s see what happens if if if the space if the space between you is and so then you you you try it that way and then you know it&amp;#39;s a little harder in Shakespeare to impro of um but in any situation where you you want to try and see where where could a seene go where would the scene go if I didn&amp;#39;t make that choice where would the scene go if I made this choice where would the scene go if I didn&amp;#39;t say that or I said something else so that&amp;#39;s how improv can be um a valuable process to learn um about limits and and boundaries um and what&amp;#39;s going on with a a character that somehow you discover in in in trying something that isn&amp;#39;t on the page then there&amp;#39;s the different thing which is the trying to make it fresh and trying to make it new and that is really a reference to theater um I&amp;#39;ll put it to you this way [Music] um anybody loves sports right so you go and you watch on a pitch you watch on a tennis game you watch basketball you watch football yeah the rules are the same but it&amp;#39;s a different game every time you&amp;#39;re out on that court or on that field it&amp;#39;s no different in theater yes it&amp;#39;s the same lines maybe even blocking is similar but what&amp;#39;s different is attack intention how you are growing in a role and watching your fellow actors grow in theirs and how every night it&amp;#39;s a new audience and they&amp;#39;re reacting differently and you literally where you can go from week one of performances in a play to week 12 is extraordinary and the difference between theater and film is that no matter how good someone might think you are in a movie you&amp;#39;ll never be any better it&amp;#39;s frozen whereas I can be better tomorrow night than I was tonight I can be better in a week than I was tonight it is a living breathing shifting changing growing thing every single day but also in theater there&amp;#39;s no safety net if you fuck it up everybody gets to see you do that and if you start giggling on stage everyone gets to see you do that too which I am very guilty of I mean there is something uh of a seduction of an audience in theater even more intense than there is when you&amp;#39;re talking about film just I got a chance to watch the documentary now in the wings on a world stage which is uh behind the scenes of you mentioned uh you teaming up with Sam Mendes in 2011 to Stage Richard III uh a play by William Shakespeare I was also surprised to learn you haven&amp;#39;t really done much Shakespeare or at least you said that in the uh in the movie but there&amp;#39;s a lot of interesting behind the scenes stuff there uh first of all the camaraderie of everybody how like the bond theater creates especially when you&amp;#39;re traveling but the another interesting thing you mentioned with the chairs of Sam man is trying different stuff it seemed like everybody was really open to trying stuff embarrassing themselves taking risks all of that I suppose that&amp;#39;s part of acting in general but theater especially just take risks it&amp;#39;s okay to embarrass the shit out of yourself including the director and it&amp;#39;s also because um you become a family you know it&amp;#39;s unlike a movie where you know I might have a scene with so and so on this day and then another scene with them in a week and a half and then that&amp;#39;s the only scenes we have in the whole movie together um every single day when you show up in the rehearsal room it&amp;#39;s the whole company you&amp;#39;re all up for it every day you&amp;#39;re learning you&amp;#39;re growing you&amp;#39;re trying and and there is a um an incredible trust that happens and I was of course fortunate that that some of the some of the things I learned and observed about um being a part of that family being included in that family and and being a part of creating that family I I I was able to observe from from people like Jack Lemon who Who led many companies that that I was fortunate to to work in and and and be a part of there&amp;#39;s also a sad moment where at the end everybody is really sad to say goodbye because you do form a family and then it&amp;#39;s over I guess somebody said that that&amp;#39;s just part of theater it&amp;#39;s like I mean there&amp;#39;s a kind of assumed goodbye and that this is it yeah and also there are sometimes when like 6 months later I&amp;#39;ll wake up in the middle of the night and I&amp;#39;ll go that&amp;#39;s how to play that scene yeah oh God I just finally figured it out so maybe you could speak a little bit more to that what&amp;#39;s the difference between film acting and live theater acting I don&amp;#39;t really think there is any I think there&amp;#39;s just you eventually learn about yourself on film you know when I first did like my first episode of The Equalizer um you know it&amp;#39;s just it&amp;#39;s just it&amp;#39;s horrible it&amp;#39;s just so bad um but I didn&amp;#39;t know about myself I didn&amp;#39;t so slowly you begin to learn about yourself but I think good acting is good acting and I think that you know if you if a camera is right here you you know that your your front row is also your back row you just don&amp;#39;t have to you don&amp;#39;t have to do so much there is in theater a particular kind of energy almost like an athlete that you have to have vocally to be able to get up seven performances a week and never lose your voice and always be there and always be alive and always be doing the best work you can that you just don&amp;#39;t require in film you know you don&amp;#39;t have to have the same um it it just doesn&amp;#39;t require the same uh kind of stamina that doing a play does it just feels like also in theater you have to become the character more intensely because you can&amp;#39;t take a break you can&amp;#39;t take a bathroom break you&amp;#39;re like on stage there&amp;#39;s no this is you yeah but you have no idea what&amp;#39;s going on on stage with the actors I mean I I I have I have literally laughed through speeches that I had to give because my fellow actors were carrots up their nose or broccoli in their ears or doing whatever they were doing to make me laugh so they&amp;#39;re just having fun they&amp;#39;re having the time of their life and by the way Judy Dench is the worst giggler of all yeah I mean they had to bring the curtain down on her and Maggie Smith because they were laughing so hard they could not continue the play so even when you&amp;#39;re doing like a dramatic monologue still they&amp;#39;re still fucking with you there&amp;#39;s stuff okay that&amp;#39;s great that&amp;#39;s good to know you also said interesting line that improvisation helps you uh learn about the character uh can you explain that so like through maybe playing with the different ways of saying the words or the different ways to bring the words to life you get to learn about yourself about the character you&amp;#39;re playing it can be helpful um but improv is I&amp;#39;m a big such a big believer in the in the the writing and in serving the writing and doing the words the writer wrote um that improv for for me unless you&amp;#39;re just doing like comedy and you know like I mean I love improv and in comedy it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s brilliant um so much fun to watch people just come up with something right there um but you&amp;#39;re you know that that&amp;#39;s where you&amp;#39;re looking for laughs and you&amp;#39;re you&amp;#39;re specifically in a little scene that&amp;#39;s being created um but I think improv is has has had value um but I I I have not experienced it as much in doing plays um as I have sometimes in doing in doing film where you&amp;#39;ll you&amp;#39;ll start off rehearsing and a director may say let&amp;#39;s just go off book and see what happens and I&amp;#39;ve had moments in film where someone went off book and it was terrifying there was a scene I had in Glen Gary Glenn rth where the character I play has has fucked something up it&amp;#39;s just screwed something up and Pacino is living and so we had the scene where Al is walking like this and the camera is moving with him and he is shoo me a new asshole and in the middle of the take Al starts talking about me oh Kevin you don&amp;#39;t think we know how you got this job you don&amp;#39;t think we know whose dick you&amp;#39;ve been sucking on to get this part in this movie and I&amp;#39;m now I&amp;#39;m literally like I don&amp;#39;t I don&amp;#39;t know what the hell is happening but I&amp;#39;m reacting we got to the end of that take Al walked up to me and he went oh that was so good oh my God that was so good just so you know the sound I asked them not to record so you have no dialogue so it&amp;#39;s just me oh that was so good you look you look like a car wreck yeah and I was like yeah and it was actually an incredibly generous thing that he gave me so that I would react oh wow did they use that shot because you were shot it was my closeup yeah yeah and yeah that&amp;#39;s the take that was an intense intera I mean what was it like if we can just Linger on that just that intense scene with alucino well he&amp;#39;s the reason I got the movie A lot of people might think because Jack was in the film that he had something to do with it but actually I was doing a play called Lost and Yonkers on Broadway and we had the same dresser who worked with him a girl named Laura it was wonderful uh Laura Bey and uh she told Al that he should come and see this play because she wanted to see me in this play I was playing this gangster it was fun fun fun part so I didn&amp;#39;t know Pacino came on some night and saw this play and then like three days later I got a call to come in an audition for this Glen greglen Ross which of course I knew is a play David Mambo&amp;#39;s play and then uh I auditioned Jamie Foley was the director who would eventually direct a bunch of House of Cards wonderful wonderful guy and I got the part well I didn&amp;#39;t quite get the part they were going to bring together the actors that they thought they were going to give the parts to on a Saturday at Al&amp;#39;s office and they asked me if I would come and do a read through and I said who&amp;#39;s going to be there and they said well so and so and so and so and so then Jack Lemon is flying and I said don&amp;#39;t tell Mr Lemon that I&amp;#39;m doing the readr is that possible they were like sure so I&amp;#39;ll never forget this Jack was sitting in a chair in Pacino&amp;#39;s office doing the New York Times crossword puzzle as he did every day like this and I walked in the door and he went oh Jesus Christ is it possible you could get a job without me Jesus Christ I&amp;#39;m so tired of holding up your end of it oh my God Jesus um so that&amp;#39;s I got the job job because of a Pacino and and you know I I was it was it was really one of the first major roles that I ever had in a film and you know to be working with that group yeah that&amp;#39;s like one of the greatest Ensemble casts ever we got Al Pacino Jack Lemon Alec Baldwin Alan Arin Ed Harris you Jonathan price it&amp;#39;s just incredible and I would have to say I mean maybe you can comment you&amp;#39;ve You&amp;#39; you&amp;#39;ve talked about how how much of a mentor and a friend Jack Clem has been that&amp;#39;s one of his greatest performances ever ever you have a scene at the end of the movie with him that was really powerful like firing on all cylinders you&amp;#39;re playing disdain to Perfection and he&amp;#39;s playing desperation to Perfection what a scene what was that like just like at the top of your game the two of you well by that time we had done long day journey tonight in the theater we&amp;#39; done a minseries called the murder of Mary figan on NBC we done a film called Dad that Gary David Goldberg directed with Ted dansen so this was the fourth time we were working together and we knew each other we become he become my father figure and and I don&amp;#39;t know if you know that I originally met Jack Lemon when I was very very young he was doing a production at the marer form of a Shan O Casey play called Juno and the peock with Walter Matthau and Marine Stapleton and on a Saturday in December of 1974 my Junior High School drama class went to a workshop it was called how to audition and we did this Workshop many schools in Southern California were part of this drama Teachers Association so we got these incredible experiences of being able to go see professional Productions and be involved in these workshops or festivals so I had to get up and do a monologue in front of Mr Lemon when I was 13 years old and he walked up to me at the end of that and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said that was a such terrific he said no I everything I&amp;#39;ve been talking about you just did yeah what&amp;#39;s your name I said Kevin he said wellit let me tell you something when you get finished with high schools I&amp;#39;m sure you&amp;#39;re going to go on and do theater you should go to New York and you should study to be an actor because this is what you&amp;#39;re meant to do with your life and he was like an idol and 12 years later I read in the New York Times that he was coming to Broadway to do this production of a Long Day&amp;#39;s Journey tonight a year and some months after I read this article and I was like I&amp;#39;m going to play Jamie in that production and I then with a lot of opposition because the cast and director didn&amp;#39;t want to see me they they said that the director Jonathan Miller uh Wanted movie actors to play the two sons and ultimately I I uh I found out that Jonathan Miller the director was coming to New York to do a series of lectures at Alice Tully Hall and I uh went to try to figure out how I could maybe meet him and uh I was sitting in that theater listening to this incredible lexury he was doing and sitting next to me was an elderly woman I mean elderly 80 something and she was asleep but sticking out of her handbag which was on the floor was a invitation to a cocktail reception in honor of Dr Jonathan Miller and so I I thought you know she&amp;#39;s tired she&amp;#39;s probably going to go home so I I I took that and walked into this cocktail reception and ultimately went over to Dr Miller who was incredibly kind and said you sit down always very curious what brings young people to my lectures and I said to him Eugene O&amp;#39;Neal brought me here and he was like what what what I&amp;#39;ve always wanted to meet him where is he and I told him that I&amp;#39;d been trying for 7 months to get an audition for long day journey and that his American casting directors were telling my agents that he wanted big American movie stars and at that moment he turned and he saw one of those casting director who was there that night CU I knew he was going to be in New York starting auditions that week and she was staring daggers at me and he just got it and he said to someone have a pen and he took the little paper started writing he said listen Kevin there there are many situations in which casting directors have a lot of say and a lot of power and a lot of Leverage and then there are other situations where they just take director&amp;#39;s messages and on this one they&amp;#39;re taking my messages this is where I&amp;#39;m St make sure you people get to me we start auditions on Thursday and on Thursday I had an opportunity to come in and audition for this play that I&amp;#39;ve been working on and preparing and at the end of it I did four scenes at the end of it he said to me that unless someone else came in and blew him against the wall like I had just done as far as he was concerned I pretty much had the part but I couldn&amp;#39;t tell my agents that yet because I had to come back and read with Mr Lemon and so 3 months later in August of 1985 I found myself in a room with Jack Lemon again at 890 Broadway which is where they rehearse a lot of Broadway plays and we did four scenes together and I was toppling over him I was pushing him I was I was relentless and I&amp;#39;ll never forget at the end of that lemon came over to me he put his hand on my shoulder and he said that would you should touch a terrific I never thought we&amp;#39;d find the rotten kid but he&amp;#39;s it Jesus Christ what the hell was that and I ended up spending the next year of my life with that man so it turns out he was right yeah this world works in mysterious ways it also speaks to the fact of the power of somebody you look up to giving words of encouragement CU those can just reverberate through your whole life and just like make the path clear I&amp;#39;ve always we used to we used to joke that uh if every contract came with a Jack Lemon Clause it would be a more beautiful world beautifully said Jack Lemon is one of the greatest actors ever what do you think makes him so damn good wow um I think he I I think he truly set out in his life to accomplish what his father said to him on his deathbed his father was Dy his father was by the way called the dut King in Boston and uh not in the entertainment business at all he was literally owned a doughnut company and uh when he was passing away Jack said the last thing my father said to me was go out there and spread a little sunshine shine and I truly think that&amp;#39;s what Jack loved to do I remember this um and I don&amp;#39;t know if this is uh will answer your question but I think it&amp;#39;s revealing about what he&amp;#39;s able to do and what he was able to do and how that ultimately influenced what I was able to do Sam endes had never directed a film before American Beauty and so what he did was he took the best elements of theater and applied them to the process so we rehearsed it like a play in a sound stage where everything was laid out like it would be in a play and this couch will be here and he&amp;#39;d sent me a couple of tapes he&amp;#39;d sent me a two cassette tapes one that he&amp;#39; likeed to call pre- Lester before he begins to um move in a New Direction and then post Lester and they just were different songs um and then he said to me one day and I think always thought this was brilliant of Sam to use lemon knowing what lemon meant to me he said when was the last time you watched the apartment and I saidh I don&amp;#39;t know I mean I love that movie so much he goes I want you to watch it again and then let&amp;#39;s talk so I went and I watched the movie again and we sat down and Sam said what lemon does in that film is incredible because there is never a moment in the movie where we see him change he just evolves and he becomes the man he becomes because of the experiences that he has the course of the film but there&amp;#39;s this remarkable consistency in who he becomes and that&amp;#39;s what I need you to do is Lester I don&amp;#39;t want the audience to ever see him change I want him to evolve and so we did some I mean first of all it was just a great Direction and then second of all we did some things that people don&amp;#39;t know we did to Aid that gradual shift of that man&amp;#39;s character first of all I had to be in the best shape from the beginning of the movie because we didn&amp;#39;t shoot it in sequence so I was in this crazy shape I had this wonderful uh trainer named Mike torsa who just was incredible but so what we did was in order to then show this gradual shift was I had three different hair pieces I had three different kinds of costumes of different colors and sizes and I had different makeup so in the beginning I was wearing a kind of drab dull slightly you know uninspired hairpiece and my makeup was kind of gray and boring and I was a little bit there were times when I was like too much like this and Sam would go Kevin you look like Walter Matha would you please stand up a little bit we&amp;#39;re sort of Midway through at this point and the then at a certain point the wig changed and it had little highlights in it a little more color a little more the makeup became a little the the suits got a little tighter and then finally a third wig that was golden highlights and sunshine and and you know rosy cheeks and tight fit and these are what we call theatrical tricks you know this is this is how you an audience doesn&amp;#39;t even know it&amp;#39;s happening but it is this gradual and I just always felt that that was such a um a brilliant way because he knew what I felt about Jack and when you watch the apartment it is extraordinary that he doesn&amp;#39;t ever change he just so I&amp;#39;m I&amp;#39;m and in fact I I thanked Jack um when I won the Oscar and uh he I I did my thank you speech and I walked off stage and I remember I had to sit down for a moment because I didn&amp;#39;t want to go I didn&amp;#39;t want to go to The Press Room because I wanted to see if Sam was going to win and so I was waiting and my phone rang and it was lemon he said you&amp;#39;re a son of a bitch I said I said what he goes first of all congratulations and thanks for thanking me cuz you know God knows you couldn&amp;#39;t have done it without me he said second of all he said you know how long it took me to win from supporting actor I wanted for Mr Roberts and it took me like 10 12 years to win Oscar you did it in four you son of a bitch yeah the apartment was I mean it&amp;#39;s widely considered one of the greatest movies ever people sometimes refer to as a comedy which is an interesting kind of classification I suppose that&amp;#39;s a lesson about comedy that the best uh the best comedy is the one that&amp;#39;s basically a tragedy well I mean some people think Clockwork Orange is a comedy and I&amp;#39;m not saying there aren&amp;#39;t some good laughs in Clockwork Orange but yeah you know it&amp;#39;s I mean yeah what&amp;#39;s that line between uh comedy and tragedy for you I well I if it&amp;#39;s a line it&amp;#39;s a line I cross all the time because I&amp;#39;ve tried always to find the humor um unexpected sometimes uh maybe inappropriate sometimes maybe shocking but I&amp;#39;ve tried in I think almost every dramatic role I&amp;#39;ve had to have a sense of humor and to be able to bring that uh along with everything else that is serious because frankly that&amp;#39;s how we deal with stuff in life you know I think uh Sam menz actually said in the N documentary something like with great theater with with great stories you find humor on the journey to the Heart of Darkness something like this very poetic stood to me I&amp;#39;m sorry I can&amp;#39;t be that poetic I&amp;#39;m very sorry but it&amp;#39;s true I mean the the the people have interacted in this world have been to a war zone and the ones who have lost the most and have suffered the most are are usually the ones who are able to uh make jokes the quickest and the jokes are often dark and absurd and cross every single line no political correctness all of that sure well I mean you know it&amp;#39;s like uh the great Mary Tyler Moore Show where they can&amp;#39;t stop giggling at at the Clown funeral I mean it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s just one of the great episodes ever you know giggling at a funeral is as bad as farting at a funeral and you know I&amp;#39;m I&amp;#39;m sure that there&amp;#39;s some people who&amp;#39;ve done both oh man uh so you mentioned American Beauty and the idea of uh not changing but evolving that&amp;#39;s really interesting because that movie is about like finding yourself it&amp;#39;s a it&amp;#39;s a philosophically profound movie it&amp;#39;s about various characters in their own ways finding their own identity in a world where um maybe a system of a materialistic system that wants you to be like everyone else and so I mean Lester is really transforms himself throughout the movie and you&amp;#39;re saying the challenge there is to still be the same human being fundamentally yeah and I also think that the film was powerful because you had three very honest and genuine portrayal of young people and then you had Lester behaving like a young person um doing things that were unexpected and and uh and I think that um the honesty with which it dealt with those uh issues that those teenagers were going through and the honesty with which it dealt with what Lester was going through um I think our some of the reasons why the film had the response that it did from so many people I mean I I used to get stopped and someone would say to me when I first saw American Beauty I was married and the second time I saw it I wasn&amp;#39;t and I was like well we weren&amp;#39;t trying to increase the divorce rate you know that wasn&amp;#39;t Our intention but it is interesting how so many people um have those kinds of crazy fantasies and what I admired so much about who Lester was as a person why I wanted to play him is because in the end he makes the right decision I think a lot of people live lives of quiet desperation in a in a job they don&amp;#39;t like in a marriage they&amp;#39;re unhappy in and to see somebody living that life and then saying fuck it in every way possible and not just in a cynical way but in a way that opens them opens Lester up to see the beauty in the world that&amp;#39;s you know the beauty in American Beauty it&amp;#39;s well and you know you may have to Blackmail your boss to get there but you know and in that there&amp;#39;s a bunch of humor also in the uh in the anger and the in the absurdity of sort of taking a stand against the Conformity of Life there there&amp;#39;s there&amp;#39;s humor and um I read somewhere that the scene the dinner scene which is kind of play likee where Lester slams the plate against the wall was improvised by you the uh the slamming of the plate against the wall no no absolutely the internet absolutely absolutely uh uh written and and directed uh um yeah can&amp;#39;t take credit for that the plate okay well that was a that was a genius interaction there um there&amp;#39;s something about the dinner table and losing your shit at the dinner table having a fight and losing your shit at the dinner table um where where else like Yellowstone was another situation where it&amp;#39;s a family at the dinner table and then one of them says fucking I&amp;#39;m not eating this anymore and I&amp;#39;m going to create a scene right it&amp;#39;s a beautiful kind of environment for dramatic scenes or or Nicholson in The Shining I mean there&amp;#39;s some there&amp;#39;s some family scenes gone ay in that movie The contrast between you and Annette Benning in that scene creates The Genius of that scene so how much of acting is the dance between two actors well with an nette I just adored working with her and we were the two actors that Sam wanted from the very beginning much against the will of the higher ups who wanted other actors to play those roles but um I&amp;#39;ve known Annette since we did a screen test together for Milos Foreman for a film he did of the L on dangerus movie it was a different film from that one but it was the same story and I&amp;#39;ve always thought she is just remarkable and I think that the work she did in that film the relationship that um we were able to build um for me the saddest part of that success was that she didn&amp;#39;t win the Oscar and I felt she should have what what kind of interesting direction did you get from from Sam mendz in how you approach playing Lester and the different how to take on the different scenes there&amp;#39;s a lot of just brilliant scenes in that movie well I I&amp;#39;ll I&amp;#39;ll share with you a story that most people don&amp;#39;t know um which is our first two days of shooting were in Smiley the place where I get a job in a fast food place yeah it&amp;#39;s a burger joint yeah yeah and um I guess it was like maybe the third day or the fourth day of shooting we&amp;#39; now done that and I said to Sam so how how are the dailies you know how how do they look he goes which ones I said well the first Smiley he goes oh um they&amp;#39;re shit and I went yeah no how were they he goes no they&amp;#39;re shit I hate them I hate everything about them I hate the costumes I hate the location I hate that you&amp;#39;re inside I hate the way you acted I Hate Everything But the script so I&amp;#39;ve gone back to the studio and asked them if we can reshoot the first two days and I was like Sam this is your very first movie you you&amp;#39;re going back to Steph Spielberg and saying I need to reshoot the the first two days entirely and he went yeah and that&amp;#39;s exactly what we did a couple of weeks later they decided that it was now a drive-thru because Annette and Peter Galler used to come into the place and ordered from the counter now Sam had decided it has to be a drive-thru you have to be in the window of the the drive-thru changed the costumes and we reshot those first two days and Sam said it was actually a moment of incredible confidence because he said the worst thing that could possibly have happened happened in my first two days and after that I was like I know what I&amp;#39;m doing and I knew I had to reshoot it and it was absolutely right and I guess that&amp;#39;s what a great director must do is have the guts in that moment to re-shoot everything I that&amp;#39;s a pretty gutsy move two other little things to share with you about Sam but the way he is you wouldn&amp;#39;t know it but the original script opened and closed with a trial Ricky was accused of Lester&amp;#39;s murder and the movie was bookended by this trial it&amp;#39;s a very different movie which they shot the entire trial for weeks okay wow yeah and I used to fly in my dreams you know those opening shots over the neighborhood I used to come into those shots in my bathrobe flying and then when I hit the ground and the newspaper was thrown at me by the newspaper guy and I caught it the alarm would go off and I wake up in bed I spent 5 days being hung by wires and filming these sequences of flying through my dreams and Sam said to me yeah the flying sequences are all gone and the trial is gone and I was like what what are you talking about um and here&amp;#39;s my other little favorite um story about Sam and that when we were shooting in the valley one of those places I flew this was an indoor set um Sam said to me in the morning hey at lunch I just want to record a guide track of all the dialogue all of your narration cuz they just needed an editing as a guide and I said sure So I remember we came outside of this in this hallway where I had a dressing room in this little Studio we were in and Sam had like a cassette tape recorder and like a little microphone and we put it on the floor and he pushed record and I read the entire narration and I never did it again that&amp;#39;s the narration in the movie because Sam said when he listened to it I wasn&amp;#39;t trying to do anything he said you had no idea where these things were going where they were going to be placed what they were going to mean you just read it so innocently so purely so directly that I I knew if I brought you into a studio and put headphones on you and had you do it again it would change the ease with which you&amp;#39;d done it and so they just fixed all of the problems that they had with this little cassette and that is the way I did it and the only time I did it was in this little hallway and once again a great performance lies in being uh doing less yeah yeah the innocence and the purity of lust he knew I would have come into the studio and fucked it up yeah what do you think about the notion of beauty that permeates American Beauty what do you think that theme is with the roses with the rose petals the the characters that are living this mundane existence slowly opening their eyes up to uh what is beautiful in life see it&amp;#39;s funny I don&amp;#39;t think of the roses and I don&amp;#39;t think of her body and the poster and I don&amp;#39;t think of those things as the beauty um I think of the bag I think that there are things we miss that are right in front of us that are truly beautiful the little things the simple things yeah and in fact I&amp;#39;ll even tell you something that I always thought was so incredible when we shot uh the scenes in the office where Lester worked the job he hated there was a bulletin board behind me on a wall and someone who was watching a cut or early dailies who was in the marketing department saw that someone had cut out a little piece of paper and stuck it and it said look closer and they presented that to Sam as the idea of what that should that could go on the poster the idea of looking closer was such a brilliant idea but it wasn&amp;#39;t I mean it wasn&amp;#39;t like wasn&amp;#39;t in the script it was just on a wall behind me and someone happened to zoom in on it and see it and thought that&amp;#39;s what this movie is about this movie is about taking the time to look closer and I think that in itself is just beautiful mortality also permeates the film you know it starts with acknowledging that death is on the way that uh your your Lester&amp;#39;s time is finite you ever think about your own death yeah scared of it um when I was at my lowest point yes it scared me what what does that fear look like what what&amp;#39;s the nature of the fear what are you afraid of that there&amp;#39;s no way out that there&amp;#39;s no answer um that nothing makes sense see the interesting thing about Lester is facing the same fear he seemed to be somehow liberated and accepted everything yeah and then saw the beauty of it cuz he got there he was given the opportunity to to reinvent himself and to and to try things he&amp;#39;d never tried to ask questions he&amp;#39;d never asked to to trust his instincts and to become the best version of himself he could become and so Dick Van djk who is uh has become an extraordinary friend of mine dick is 98 years old and he says you know if I known I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself um when I spend time with him him I&amp;#39;m just moved by every day you know he gets up and he goes it&amp;#39;s a good day I woke up and I learn a lot about I I have a a different feeling about death now than I did seven years ago uh and I on the path to being able to be in a place where I&amp;#39;ve resolved the things I needed to resolve and won&amp;#39;t won&amp;#39;t probably get to all of it in my lifetime but I certainly would like to be at a place where if I were if I were to Dro dead tomorrow it would have been an amazing life so Lester got there it sounds like dig Fang Dy got there you&amp;#39;re trying to get there sure you said you feared death at your lowest Point what was the lowest point it was uh November 1st of 2017 and then Thanksgiving Day of that same year so let&amp;#39;s talk about it let&amp;#39;s talk about this dark time let&amp;#39;s talk about the sexual allegations against you that led to you being cancelled by uh well the entire world for the last seven years I would like to personally understand the sins the bad things you did and the bad things you didn&amp;#39;t do so I also should say that the thing I hope to do here is to give respect to Due Process innocent until proven guilty that the mass hysterium machine of the internet and clickbait journalism doesn&amp;#39;t do so here&amp;#39;s what I understand there were criminal and civil trials brought against you including the one that started it all when Anthony rap sued you for $40 million in these trials you were acquitted found not guilty and not liable is that right yes I think that&amp;#39;s really important again in terms of due process and I read a a lot and I watched a lot in preparation for this on this on this point Point um including of course the recently uh detailed interviews you did with Dan Wooten and then Allison Pearson of the Telegraph and those are all focused on this topic and they go in detail where you respond in detail to many of the allegations if people are interested in the details they can listen to those So based on that and everything I looked at as I understand you never prevented anyone from leaving if they wanted to sort of in the sexual context for example by blocking the door is that right that&amp;#39;s correct yeah you always respected the explicit know from people again the sexual context is that right that is correct you&amp;#39;ve never done anything sexual with an underage person right never and also as is sometimes done in Hollywood let me ask this you&amp;#39;ve never explicitly offered to exchange sexual favors for career advancement correct correct in terms of bad behavior what did you do what was the the worst of it and how often did you do it I have heard now quite often that everybody has a Kevin Spacey story um and what that tells me is that I hit on a lot of guys how often did you cross the line and what does that mean to you I did a lot of horsing around I did a lot of things that at the time I thought were sort of playful and fun and I have learned since we&amp;#39;re not and I have had to recognize that I I crossed some boundaries and I did some things that were wrong and I made some mistakes and that&amp;#39;s in my past I mean I&amp;#39;ve been working so hard over these last seven years to have the conversations I needed to have to listen to people to understand things from a different perspective than the one that I had and to say I will never behave that way again for the rest of my life just to clarify I think your were often too pushy with the flirting and that manifested itself in in multiple ways but just to make clear you never prevented anyone from leaving if they wanted to you always took the explicit no from people as an answer no stop you took that for the answer you&amp;#39;ve never done anything sexual with an underage person and you&amp;#39;ve never explic offered to exchange sexual favors for career advancement these are some of the sort of accusations that have been made and in the court of law multiple times have been shown not to be true but I have had a sexual life and I&amp;#39;ve fallen in love and I&amp;#39;ve been so admir admiring of people that I that I I mean I&amp;#39;m I&amp;#39;m so romantic I&amp;#39;m such a romantic person that there&amp;#39;s this whole side of me that hasn&amp;#39;t been talking about isn&amp;#39;t being discussed but that&amp;#39;s that&amp;#39;s who I know that&amp;#39;s the person I know it&amp;#39;s been very upsetting to hear that some people have said I I mean I don&amp;#39;t have a violent bone in my body but to hear people describe things as having been very aggressive is incredibly um difficult for me and I&amp;#39;m deeply sorry that I ever offended anyone or hurt anyone in any way it is it is crushing to me and I have to work very hard to show and to prove that I have learned um I&amp;#39;ve got the memo and I will never ever ever behave in those ways again from everything I&amp;#39;ve seen in public interactions with you people love you colleagues love you co-workers love you they there&amp;#39;s a flirtatiousness another word for that is chemistry there&amp;#39;s a Chemistry Between the people you work with and by the way not to take anything away from my accountability for things I did where I got it wrong I crossed the line I pushed some boundaries I accept all of that but I live in an industry in which flirtation uh attraction people meeting in the workspace and ending up marrying each other and having children and so it is a it is a it is a space and a place where these Notions of family these Notions of attraction these Notions of It&amp;#39;s Always complicated if you meet someone in the workspace and find yourselves attracted to each other you have to be mindful of that and you have to be very mindful that you don&amp;#39;t ever want anyone to feel that um their job is in Jeopardy um or you would punish them in some way if they no longer wanted to be with you so those are important uh things to just acknowledge another complexity to this as as I&amp;#39;ve seen is that there&amp;#39;s just a huge number of actors that look up to you a huge number of people in the industry that look up to you so just and love you I I&amp;#39;ve seen just from this documentary just a lot of people just love being around you uh learning from you what it means to create great Theater Great film great stories and so that adds to the complexity I wouldn&amp;#39;t say it&amp;#39;s a power Dynamic like a boss employee relationship it&amp;#39;s a admiration Dynamic that is easy to miss and easy to take advantage of is that something you understand yes and I also understand that there are people who met me and spent a very brief period of time with me but presumed I was now going to be their mentor and then behaved in a way that I was unaware of that they were either participating or flirting along uh or encouraging me uh without me having any idea that that at the end of the day they were expecting something um so these are about relationships that these are about two people these are about people making decisions people making choices and I I accept my accountability in that but there are a number of things that I&amp;#39;ve been accused of that just simply did not happen and and I can&amp;#39;t say and I don&amp;#39;t think it would be right for me to say well I you know everything that&amp;#39;s ever been I&amp;#39;ve been accused of is true because we&amp;#39;ve now proved that it isn&amp;#39;t and it wasn&amp;#39;t um but I&amp;#39;m perfectly willing to accept that I had behaviors that were wrong and that I shouldn&amp;#39;t have done and I am regretful for I think that&amp;#39;s also speaks to uh Dark Side of Fame the sense I got is that there are some people potentially a lot of people trying to make friends with you in order to get roles in order to advance their career so not you using them but they trying to use you uh what&amp;#39;s that like how do you know if somebody likes you for you for Kevin or likes you for uh like you you said you&amp;#39;re romantic you see a person and you&amp;#39;re like I like this person and they seem to like you how do you know if they like you for you well to some degree I would say that I have been able to trust my instincts on that and that I&amp;#39;ve most of the time been right but obviously in the last number of years not just with people who&amp;#39;ve accused me but just also people in my own industry you know to realize that oh I thought we had a friendship but I guess that was about an inch thick and and and not what I thought it was um but look the you know one shouldn&amp;#39;t be surprised by that I have to also say you know you said a little while ago that the world had canceled me and I have to disagree with you I have to disagree because for seven years I&amp;#39;ve been stopped by people sometimes every day sometimes multiple multiple times a day and the conversations that I have with people the generosity that they share the kindness that they show and how much they want to know when I&amp;#39;m getting back to work tells me that while there may be a very loud minority there is a quieter majority in the industry have you been betrayed in life and how do you not let that make you cynical I think betrayal is a really interesting word but I think if you&amp;#39;re going to be betrayed it has to be by those who truly know you and I can tell you that I have not been betrayed that&amp;#39;s a beautiful way to put it for the times you cross the line do you take responsibility for the wrongs you&amp;#39;ve done yes are you sorry to the people you may have hurt emotionally yes and I have spoken to many of them privately privately which is where amend should be made were they able to start finding forgiveness absolutely some of the most moving conversations that I have had when I was determined to take accountability have been those people have said thank you so much and I think I can forgive you now if you got a chance to talk to the Kevin Spacey of 30 to 40 years ago what would you uh tell him to change about his ways and how how would you do it what what would be your approach would you be nice about it would you smack them around I think if I were to go back that far I probably would have found a way to um not have been as concerned about my revealing my sexuality and hiding that for as long as I did I think that had a um a lot to do with confusion and a lot to do with mistrust um both my own and other people&amp;#39;s for for most of your life you were not open with the public about being gay what was the hardest thing about keeping who you love a secret that I didn&amp;#39;t find the right moment of Celebration to be able to share that that must be a thing that weighs on you to not be able to fully yeah celebrate your love you know Ian McKellen said after 40 he was 49 when he came out 27 years he&amp;#39;d been a professional actor being in the closet and he said he felt it was like he was living a part of his life not being truthful and that he felt that it affected his work when he did come out because he no longer felt like he had anything to hide and I absolutely believe that that is what my experience has been and will continue to be um I I am sorry about the way I came out um but I had but Evan and I had already had the conversation I was I had already decided to come out and so it wasn&amp;#39;t like oh I I was forced to come out but it was something I decided to do and by the way much against evans&amp;#39;s advice I I I came out in that statement and he wishes that I I had not done so yeah you made a statement uh when um the initial accusation happened there could be up there&amp;#39;s one of the worst social media posts of all time into it&amp;#39;s like two for one don&amp;#39;t hold back now come on really tell me how you feel the first part you kind of implicitly admitted to doing something bad which was later shown and proved completely to never have happened it was a a lie no I I I basically said that I didn&amp;#39;t remember what this person was the Anthony rap was claiming from 31 years before uh I had no memory of it but if it had happened if this embarrassing moment had happened then I would owe him an apology that was what I said and then I said and while I&amp;#39;m at it I think I&amp;#39;ll come out and you know it was definitely not the greatest coming out party ever I I I will admit that but from the public perception the first part of that so first of all the second part is a is a horrible way to come out yes we all agree and then the first part from the public Viewpoint they see Guilt in that which also is tragic because at least that particular accusation and is a very dramatic one it&amp;#39;s a $40 million lawsuit it&amp;#39;s a big deal and an underage person was shown to be false well but you&amp;#39;re you&amp;#39;re melding two things together the lawsuit didn&amp;#39;t happen until 2020 and then it didn&amp;#39;t get to court until 2022 we&amp;#39;re back in 2017 when it was just an accusation he made in BuzzFeed magazine um look I I was backed into a corner when someone says you were so drunk you won&amp;#39;t remember this thing happened what&amp;#39;s your first instinct is your first instinct to say this person&amp;#39;s a liar or is your first instinct to go what I was what 31 years at a party I don&amp;#39;t even remember throwing obviously a lot of Investigation happened after that in which we were then able to prove in that in that court case that it had never occurred but at the moment I was sort of being told I couldn&amp;#39;t push back I you have to be kind you can&amp;#39;t I think you know even to me now none of it sounds right but I don&amp;#39;t know that I could have said anything that would have been satisfactory to anybody okay there&amp;#39;s a almost convincing explanation for the worst social media post of all time I almost accept it I&amp;#39;m really surprised you you I guess you haven&amp;#39;t read a lot of media posts cuz I can&amp;#39;t believe that&amp;#39;s the actual worst one it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s beautifully bad that&amp;#39;s how bad that social media post is as you mentioned uh Liam niss and Sharon Stone came out and suppor of you recently uh speaking to your character a lot of people who know you and some of whom I know uh who have worked with you privately show support for you but are afraid to speak up publicly what do you make of that I mean to me personally this just makes me sad because perhaps that&amp;#39;s the nature of the industry that it&amp;#39;s difficult to do that but I just wish there would be a little bit more courage in the world I I don&amp;#39;t think it&amp;#39;s about the industry I think it&amp;#39;s about our time I think it&amp;#39;s the time that we&amp;#39;re in and people are very afraid just afraid just a general General no they&amp;#39;re literally afraid that um they&amp;#39;re going to get cancelled if they stand up for someone who has been um and I think it&amp;#39;s I mean you know we&amp;#39;ve seen this many times in history this is not the first time it&amp;#39;s happened so as you said your darkest moment in 17 when all of this went down uh one of the things that happened is you were no longer on the hos of cards for the last season uh let&amp;#39;s go to the beginning of that show okay one of the greatest TV series of all time a dark fascinating character in Frank Underwood a ruthless cunning borderline evil politician uh what are some interesting aspects uh to the process you went through for becoming Frank Underwood maybe Richard III there&amp;#39;s a lot of elements there in your performance that maybe uh inspired that character well is that fair or no I&amp;#39;ll give you uh I&amp;#39;ll give you one very interesting um specific education that I got in doing Richard III and closing that show at Dam in March of 2012 and two months later started shooting House of Cards there is something called direct address um in Shakespeare um you have Hamlet talks to the world but when Shakespeare wrote Richard III it was the first time he created something called direct address which is the character looks directly at each person close by it is a different kind of uh sharing than when a character is doing a monologue a opening of Henry 4 um and while there are some people who believe that director dress was invented in Ferris buer it wasn&amp;#39;t it was Shakespeare who invented it so I had just had this experience every night in theaters all over the world seeing how people reacted to becoming a co-conspirator because that&amp;#39;s what it&amp;#39;s about and what I tried to do and what uh finer really helped me with in those beginning days um was how to look in that camera and imagine I was talking to my best friend because you&amp;#39;re sharing the secret of the darkness of how this game is played with that best friend yeah and there were many times when um I I I suppose the writers thought I was crazy where I would see a script and I would see like this moment where this direct address would happen i&amp;#39;&amp;#39;d say all this stuff and I&amp;#39;d go and we do a read through of the script I go I don&amp;#39;t think I need to say any of that and they were like what do you mean I said well the audience knows all of that all I have to do is look they know exactly what&amp;#39;s going on I don&amp;#39;t need to say a thing so I was often cutting dialogue um because it just wasn&amp;#39;t needed because that relationship between that I&amp;#39;d learned that I&amp;#39;d experienced doing Richard III was so extraordinary where I literally watched people they were like oh I&amp;#39;m in on the thing and this is so awesome and then suddenly wait he killed the kids he killed those kids in the tower oh maybe it&amp;#39;s not so and you literally would watch them start to re reverse their having had such a great time with Richard III and the first you know three acts I thought this is going to happen in this show if this um intimacy can actually land um and I think just think there was some brilliant writing and we always attempted to do it in one take no matter how long something was we would try to do it in one take the direct addresses so there was never a cut when we went on a locations we started to then find ways to cut it and make it slightly broader but that&amp;#39;s interesting cuz you&amp;#39;re you&amp;#39;re doing a bunch of with both Richard third and Frank Underwood a bunch of dark borderline evil things and then I guess the idea is you&amp;#39;re going to be losing the audience and then you win them back over with the addresses that&amp;#39;s the remarkable thing is against their instincts and their better sense of what they should and should not do they still rallied around Frank Underwood and I saw even with the documentary The glimmers of that with Richard III I mean you were seducing the audience like there was such a chemistry between you and the audience on stage yeah yeah well he in that production that&amp;#39;s absolutely true um also Richard is one of the weirder uh weird I mean by weird was an early play of Shakespeare&amp;#39;s and he&amp;#39;s basically never off stage I mean I remember when we did the first run through I had no idea what the next scene was every time I came off stage I had no idea what was next they literally had to drag me from one place to another say now it&amp;#39;s the scene with hting now it&amp;#39;s the but I now understand these wonderful stories that you can read in in old books about Shakespeare&amp;#39;s time that actors grabbed Shakespeare around the cuff and punched him and threw him up against wall and said you ever write a part like this again I&amp;#39;m going to kill you and that&amp;#39;s why in later plays he started to have pageant happened and then a wedding happened and the main character was offstage resting because the actor had said you can&amp;#39;t do this to us there&amp;#39;s no breaks and it&amp;#39;s true there&amp;#39;s very few breaks in Richard II you&amp;#39;re on stage most of the time the comedic aspect of Richard III and Frank Underwood is is that a component that helps bring out the full complexity of the the darkness that is Frank Underwood I I certainly can&amp;#39;t uh take credit for Shakespeare having written something that is funny or B willan and his team to have written something that is funny is fundamentally funny it just depends on how on how I interpret it on on uh you know there are you know that&amp;#39;s one of the great things why we love you know in a years&amp;#39;s time we can see five different hamlets we can see four Richard III&amp;#39;s we can see to Richard II&amp;#39;s that&amp;#39;s part of the thrill that we don&amp;#39;t own these parts we borrow them and we interpret them and what Ian McKellen might do with a role could be completely different from what I might do because of the way we perceive it and also very often in terms of going for humor it&amp;#39;s very often a director will say why don&amp;#39;t you say that with a bit of irony why don&amp;#39;t you try that with a bit of B yeah there&amp;#39;s often that that like a a Ry smile the line that jumps to me when you&amp;#39;re talking about Claire um in the early maybe first episode even I love that woman more than sharks love blood I just there and I mean I guess there&amp;#39;s a lot of ways to read that line but the way you read it had both humor had legitimate affection had all the ambition and narcissism all of that mixed up together I also think that one should just acknowledge that where he was from there is something that happens when you do an accent and in fact sometimes the when I would say to Bo or or one of the other writers this is really good and I love the idea but it rhythmically doesn&amp;#39;t help I I I need I need at least two more words to rhythmically make this work in his accent because it just doesn&amp;#39;t scan uh and that&amp;#39;s not I Amic pentameter I&amp;#39;m not talking about that there is that as well in Shakespeare but there was sometimes when it&amp;#39;s too many lines it&amp;#39;s not enough lines in order for me to make this work uh for the way he speaks the way he sounds and what that accent does to emphasis how much of that character in terms of the musicality of the way he speaks is Bill Clinton uh not really at all I mean Clinton you know look Bill Clinton he had a way of talking you know that he was very slow and he felt your pain you know but Frank Underwood was a a deeper um more direct um and less poetic uh in the way that that uh Clinton would talk I&amp;#39;ll tell you this Clinton story that you&amp;#39;ll like so we decided to do a performance of The Iceman Cometh for the Democratic party on Broadway and the president is going to come he&amp;#39;s going to see this 4 and a half hour play and then we&amp;#39;re going to do this event afterward and I know a couple weeks before we&amp;#39;re going to do this event someone at the White House calls and says um listen it&amp;#39;s very unusual to get the president for like 6 and 1 half hours so we&amp;#39;re suggesting that the president come and see the First Act and then he goes and I knew what was happening now first of all Clinton knows this play he knows what this play is about and I you know as gently as I could said well if the president is thinking of leaving at intermission then I&amp;#39;m afraid we&amp;#39;re going to have to cancel the event there&amp;#39;s just no way that so anyway then oh no it&amp;#39;s fine it&amp;#39;s fine now I know what was happening what was happening was that someone had read the play and they were quite concerned and I&amp;#39;ll tell you why because the play is about this character that I uh portrayed named hickey and in the course of the play as things get more and more revealed you realize that this man that I&amp;#39;m playing has been a philanderer and he&amp;#39;s cheated on his wife quite a lot and by the end of the play he is arrested and taken off because he ended up ending his wife&amp;#39;s life because she she forgave him too much and he couldn&amp;#39;t live with it mhm so now imagine this there&amp;#39;s 2,000 people at the brookson theater watching President Clinton watching this play and at the end of the night we take our Curtain Call they bring out the presidential Podium Bill Clinton stands up there and he says well I suppose we should all thank Kevin and this extraordinary company of actors for giving us all way too much to think [Laughter] about and the audience fell over in laughter and then he gave a great speech and I thought that was a pretty good way to handle that well in that way him and Frank Underwood share like a Charisma there&amp;#39;s certain presidents that just have politicians that just have this Charisma you can&amp;#39;t stop listening to them some of it is the accent but some of it is some other magical thing when I uh was starting to do research um I wanted to meet with the whip Kevin McCarthy and uh he wouldn&amp;#39;t meet with me till I called his office back and said tell him I&amp;#39;m playing a Democrat not a Republican and then he met with me nice and he was helpful he he took me to whip meetings politicians uh so you worked with David Fincher there he uh he was the executive producer but he also directed The the first two episodes yeah high level what was it like working with him again uh in which ways do you think he helped guide you in the show to become the great show that it was I I give him uh a huge amount of um the credit and not just for what he established but the fact that every director after stayed within that world I think that&amp;#39;s why the series had a very consistent feeling to it it was like watching a very long movie the style where the camera went what it did what it didn&amp;#39;t do how we used this how we used that how we didn&amp;#39;t do this there were there were things that he laid the foundation for that we managed to maintain pretty much until uh bo Willman left the show they got rid of Fincher and I was sort of the last man standing in terms of fighting again Netflix had never had any creative control at all we had complete creative control but over time they started to get themselves involved because look this is what happens to networks you know they never made a television show before ever and then four years later they they were the best and so you know then you&amp;#39;re going to get suggestions about casting and about writing and about who music and scenes and so there was there was a a considerable amount of a push back that I had to do when they started to get involved in ways that I thought was affecting the quality of the show what are those battles like like I heard that there was a battle of the exacts like you mentioned early on about your name not being on the billing for seven I heard that there&amp;#39;s battles about the ending of seven which was really um well it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s was pretty dark so what&amp;#39;s that battle like how often does that happen and how do you win that battle like cuz it feels like there&amp;#39;s line where the networks or the the execs are really afraid of Crossing that line into this strange uncomfortable place and then the the director great directors and great actors kind of flirt with that line it can happen in different ways I mean I remember one uh uh argument we had was we had specifically shot a scene so that there would be no score in that scene so that there was no music it was just two people talking and then we end up seeing a cut where they&amp;#39;ve decided to put music in and it is against everything that scene&amp;#39;s supposed to be about and you have to go and say guys this was intentional we did not want score and now you&amp;#39;ve added score because what you think it&amp;#39;s too quiet you think an our audience can&amp;#39;t listen to two people talk for two and a half minutes with this show has proved anything it&amp;#39;s proved that people have patience and their willing to watch an entire season over a weekend um so there are those kind of uh arguments that can happen um you know there&amp;#39;s there&amp;#39;s the the different different arguments on different levels and and they sometimes have to do with I mean look go back to the Godfather they wanted to fire Pacino because they didn&amp;#39;t see anything happening they saw nothing happening so they wanted to fire Pacino and then finally Copa thought I&amp;#39;ll shoot the scene where he kills the police Poli commissioner and and they&amp;#39;ll do that scene now and that was the first scene where they went yeah actually there&amp;#39;s something going on there so Pacino kept the role you think that Godfathers when Pacino was like the Pacino we know was born or is that more like there&amp;#39;s the character the Really Over the Top incen a woman there&amp;#39;s like stages I suppose yeah of course look I think that we we can&amp;#39;t forget that Pacino is also an animal of the theater you know he does a lot of plays and he started off doing plays and you know movies were you know panic and needle Park was his first um and yeah I think there&amp;#39;s that period of time when he was doing some incredible Parts Incredible movies when I did a series called wise guy I got cast on a Thursday and I flew up to Vancouver on a Saturday I started shooting on Monday and all I had time to do was watch The Godfather and Serpico and then I went to work [Laughter] would you say ridiculous question Godfather greatest film of all time well certainly certainly yes yes um but I also look I I&amp;#39;m I&amp;#39;m allowed to change my opinion I can next week say it&amp;#39;s Lawrence of Arabia or a week after that I can say um Sullivan travels I mean that&amp;#39;s the wonderful thing about movies and particularly great movies is when you see them again it&amp;#39;s like seeing them for the first time and you pick up things that you didn&amp;#39;t see the last time and and for that day you fall in love with that movie you might even say uh to a friend that that is the greatest movie of all time and also I think it&amp;#39;s the it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s the degree with which directors are daring I mean kubric decided to cast one actor to play three major roles in Doctor Strange Love I mean who who has the balls to do that today I was going to mention when we&amp;#39;re talking about seven that just if if you&amp;#39;re if you&amp;#39;re looking at the greatest performances portrayals of murderers so obviously like I mentioned Han elector and Silence of the Lambs that&amp;#39;s up there seven to me is like competing for first place with Silence of the Lambs but then there&amp;#39;s a different one uh with kubri and Jack Nicholson right with Shin with The Shining and there&amp;#39;s um as opposed to a murderer who&amp;#39;s always been a murderer here&amp;#39;s a person like in American Beauty who becomes that who descends into madness yeah I I read also that Jack dingon improvised here&amp;#39;s Johnny in that scene I believe that that&amp;#39;s a very different performance than yours in seven what uh what do you make of that performance Nicholson&amp;#39;s always been such an incredible actor because he has absolutely no shame about being demonstrative and over the-top and he also has no problem charact playing characters who are deeply flawed and he&amp;#39;s interested in that I have a pretty good Nicholson story though nobody nobody knows you also have a pretty good uh Nicholson impression but what&amp;#39;s the story story is um story was told to me by a sound man Dennis maitlin who&amp;#39;s a great great great guy he said he uh he was very excited because he he got on PR&amp;#39;s honor which was Jack Nicholson Angelic Houston directed by John Houston and he said I was so excited it&amp;#39;s my first day on the movie and I get told to go into Mr Nicholson&amp;#39;s trailer and mic him up for the first scene so I knock on the trailer door and I hear yes and uh come on in and I come inside Mr Nicholson is changing out of his regular clothes and he&amp;#39;s putting on he&amp;#39;s going to put on his costume and so I&amp;#39;m setting up the mic and I&amp;#39;m getting ready and I said Mr Nicholson I I just wanted to tell you I&amp;#39;m I&amp;#39;m extremely excited to be working with you again it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s a great pleasure and Jack goes did we work together before and he says yes yes we uh we did he what what film did we do together he says uh well we did U Missouri breaks Nicholson goes oh my God Missouri breaks Jesus Christ we were out of our minds on that film holy shit Jesus Christ it&amp;#39;s wonder I&amp;#39;m alive my god there was so much drugs going on and we were stoned out of our minds holy shit just then he folds the pants that he&amp;#39;s just taken off over his arm and an eighth of coke drops out on the floor Dennis looks at it Nicholson looks at it Jack goes haven&amp;#39;t worn these pants since Missouri braks man I love that guy unapologetically himself oh yeah your impression of him like at the AFI was just it just great well that was for that was for Mike Nichols oh yeah he had a big impact in your career huge can you talk about him like what what role did he play in your life I think it was uh yeah it was 1984 I went into audition for the national tour of a play called the real thing which Jeremy Irons and Glen Close were doing on Broadway that Mr Nichols had directed so I went in to read for this character bro who is a Scottish character and I did the audition and uh Mike Nichols comes down the aisle of the theater and he&amp;#39;s asking me questions about where did you go to school and what have you been doing and I just come back from doing a bunch of years of regional theater and different theaters so I was in New York and meeting Mike Nicholls was just incredible so Mr Nichols went um have you um have you seen the other play that I directed up the block called Hurley Burley and I said no I haven&amp;#39;t he says why not I said I can&amp;#39;t afford a Broadway ticket he said we can arrange that I&amp;#39;d like you to go see that play and then I&amp;#39;d like you to come in next week and audition for that and I was like okay so I went to see hurle Burley William Hurt Harvick Kel Chris walin Candace Bergen Cynthia Nixon Jerry Stiller and I watched this play it&amp;#39;s play David Ray play about Hollywood this is crazy I mean Bill hurt was like unbelievable and it was Extraordinary Chris wer so this&amp;#39;s this harvi Kel won came in later harv Kel&amp;#39;s playing this part and uh I come in on I audition for it and Nicholls says I want you to uh understudy Harvey kitel I want you to understudy Phil and I&amp;#39;m like Phil I mean Harvey Cel is like in his 40s he looks like he can beat the shit out everybody on stage I&amp;#39;m this like 20 foury old and Nicholls said it&amp;#39;s just all about attitude if you believe you can beat the shit on everybody on stage the audience will too okay so I then started to learn Phil and the way it works when you&amp;#39;re in understudy unless you&amp;#39;re a name they don&amp;#39;t let you rehearse on the stage you just in a rehearsal room but I used to sneak onto the stage and rehearse and try to figure out where the props were and yada y anyway one day I get a call you&amp;#39;re going on today it&amp;#39;s Phil so I went on Nicholls is told by Peter Lawrence who&amp;#39;s the stage manager Spacey&amp;#39;s going on as Phil so Nicholls comes down and watches the second act comes backstage he says that was really good how soon could you learn Mickey Mickey was the role that Ron Silver was playing that uh Chris Walkin also played I said I I don&amp;#39;t I don&amp;#39;t know I maybe a couple weeks he goes learn Mickey too so I I learned Mickey and then one day I&amp;#39;m told you&amp;#39;re going on tomorrow night is Mickey Nicholls comes sees the second act comes backstage says that was really good I mean that was really funny how soon could you learn Eddie and so I became like the pinch hitter on Hurley Burley I learned all the male parts including Jerry Stillers although I never went on is Jerry Stillers part and then I left the play and I guess about two months later I get this phone call from Mike Nichols he&amp;#39;s like Kevin how are you and I&amp;#39;m like I&amp;#39;m fine what what can I do for you he says well I&amp;#39;m going to make a film this summer with Mandy and Merill and there&amp;#39;s a role I&amp;#39;d like you to come in and and uh an audition for so I I went in auditioned cast me as this Mugger on a subway then there&amp;#39;s this whole upheaval that happens because he then doesn&amp;#39;t continue with Mandy pkin Mandy leaves the movie and he asks Jack Nicholson to come in and replace Mandy pimkin so now I had no scenes with him but I&amp;#39;m in a movie with Jack Nicholson and Merl Streep and my first scene in this movie which I shot on my birthday July 26th of 85 um I got to wink at Merill Street uh in this scene and I I was so nervous I I literally couldn&amp;#39;t wink Nicholls had to like calm me down and help me wink um but that became my first my very first film um and he was incredible and he let me come and watch when they were shooting scenes I wasn&amp;#39;t in um and I remember ending up one day in the makeup trailer on the same day we were working Jack and me we had no scene together but I remember him coming in and they put him down in the chair and they put cucumbers frozen cucumbers on his eyes and did his neck and then they raised him up and did his face and then I remember Nicholson went like this looked in the mirror and he went [Applause] another day another $50,000 and walked out of the trailer well what was Christopher Walkin like a so he&amp;#39;s a he&amp;#39;s a theater guy too oh yeah he started out as a chorus boy dancer well I can see that yeah the guy I&amp;#39;ve known walking a long time and I did a center at live where I did um we did these Star Wars auditions so I did Chris Walkin as as Hans so so good and uh I&amp;#39;ll never forget this I was in Los Angeles about two weeks after and I was at chatow maral there&amp;#39;s some party happening at chatow maral and I saw Chris walan come out of onto the balcony and I was like oh shit it&amp;#39;s Chris Walkin and he walked up to and he went gevin I saw you little sketch it was funny haha oh man it was a really good sketch and that guy there&amp;#39;s certain people that are truly unique and Unapologetic continue being that throughout their whole career the way they talk the musicality of how they talk how they are their way of being he&amp;#39;s that yeah and and it somehow Works watch yeah and I mean he works in so many different cont his he plays like a mobster in True Romance mhm and it&amp;#39;s like genius that&amp;#39;s genius but he could he could be anything he could be soft he could be a badass all of it and he&amp;#39;s so Christopher walking but somehow works for all these different characters so I guess we were talking about House of Cards like two hours ago before we uh took a tangent upon a tangent but there&amp;#39;s a moment in episode one where president Walker broke his promise to Frank Underwood that he would make him a secretary of state was this when the monster in Frank was born or was the monster was there the sort of for you looking at that character was there an idealistic notion to him that there&amp;#39;s loyalty and that broke him or did he always know that there is this this whole world is about manipulation and do anything to get power well I mean it might have been the first moment an audience saw him be betrayed but it certainly was not the first betrayal he&amp;#39; experienced and once you start to get to know him and learn about his life and learn about his father and learn about his you know friends and learn about their relationship and learn what he was like even as a Cadet I think you start to realize that this is a man who has um very strong beliefs about loyalty and so wasn&amp;#39;t the first it was just the first moment that in terms of the storyline that&amp;#39;s being built night takes King was the name of our production company yeah uh what do you think motivated him at that moment and throughout the show was it all about power and also Legacy or was there some small part underneath at all where he wanted to actually do good in the world no I I think power is a is a afterthought what he loved more than anything was being able to predict how human beings would react he was a behavioral psychologist and he could know like he was 17 moves ahead in a chess game he could know if he did this at this moment that eventually this would happen he was able to be predictive and was usually right he knew just how far he needed to push someone to get them to do what he needed them to do in order to make make the next step work you&amp;#39;ve played a bunch of evil characters well you call them evil but you don&amp;#39;t but but my the reason I say that I don&amp;#39;t mean to be snarky about it but the reason I say it that way is because I never judge the people I play and the people that I have played or that any actor has played don&amp;#39;t necessarily view themselves as this label it&amp;#39;s easy to say but that&amp;#39;s not the way I can think I cannot judge a character I play and then play them well I have to be free of judgment I have to just play them and let the cards drop where they where they may and let an audience judge I mean the fact that you use that word perfectly fine that&amp;#39;s your you know but it&amp;#39;s like people asking me you know was I really from kpack or not you know it&amp;#39;s just entirely depends on your perspective do roles like that like seven like Frank Underwood like uh lesser from American Beauty they change you psychologically as a person so walking around in the skin of these characters these complex characters with a ve very different moral systems um I absolutely believe that wandering around in someone else&amp;#39;s ideas in someone else&amp;#39;s clothes in someone else&amp;#39;s shoes teaches you enormous empathy and and that goes to the heart of not judging and I have found that I have been so moved by I mean look let&amp;#39;s yes you you&amp;#39;ve identified the darker characters but I put Clarence Darrow three times I&amp;#39;ve played a play called national anthems I&amp;#39;ve done movies like recount I&amp;#39;ve done films like the ref I&amp;#39;ve done films that in which there are that isn&amp;#39;t that doesn&amp;#39;t exist in any of those characters that those qualities paid forward um and so it is um incredible to be able to embrace those things that I admire and that are are like me and those things that I don&amp;#39;t admire and aren&amp;#39;t like me but I have to put them on an equal footing and say I have to just play them as best I can and not um decide to wield judgment over them without judgment without judgment in Gulag archipelago Alexander soier niten famously writes about the line between good and evil and that it runs to the heart of every man so the the full paragraph there when he talks about the line during the life of any heart this line keeps changing Place sometimes it is squeezed One Way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish one and the same human being is at various ages under various circumstances a totally different human being at times he is close to being a devil at times to sainthood but his name doesn&amp;#39;t change and to that name we ascribe the whole lot good and evil uh what do you think about this note uh that we&amp;#39;re all capable of Good and Evil and throughout life that line moves and shifts throughout the day throughout every hour M yeah I mean um one of the things that I&amp;#39;ve been focused on um very succinctly is the idea that every day is an opportunity it&amp;#39;s an opportunity to make better decisions to learn and to grow um and I also think that look I I grew up not knowing if my parents loved me particularly my father I I never had a sense that I was loved and that stayed with me my whole life and when I think back at who my father was and more succinctly who he became it was a gr gradual and slow and sad development when I&amp;#39;ve gone back and now I&amp;#39;ve looked at um Diaries my father kept and albums he kept particularly when he was a medic in the US Army served our country with distinction when the war was over and they went to Germany the things my father said the things that he wrote the things that he believed were as patriotic as any American soldier who had ever served but then when he came back to America and he had a dream of being a journalist or his big Hope was that he was going to be the Great American novelist he wanted to be a creative novelist and so he sat in his office and he wrote for 45 years and never published anything and somewhere along the way in order to make money he became what they call a technical procedure writer which which the best way to describe that is that if you built the F-16 aircraft my father would have written a manual to tell you how to do it I mean as boring as technical as tedious as you can imagine and so somewhere in the 60s and into the 70s my father fell in with groups of people and individuals pretend intellectuals who started to give him reasons why he was not successful as a white Aryan man in the United States and over time my father became a white supremacist and I cannot tell you the amount of times as a young boy that my father would sit me down and lecture me for hours and hours and hours about his fucked up ideas of America of prejudice of white supremacy and thank God for my sister who said Don&amp;#39;t listen to a thing he says he&amp;#39;s out of his mind and even though I was young I knew everything he was saying was against people and I I loved people I had so many wonderful friends my best friend Mike who&amp;#39;s still my close friend to this day I was afraid to bring him to my house because I was afraid that my father would find out he was Jewish or that my father would leave his office door open and some of them would see his Nazi flag or his pictures of Hitler or Nazi books or what he might say so when I found theater in the e8th grade and Debate Club and choir and festivals and plays and everything I could do to participate in that wouldn&amp;#39;t make me have to come back home I did and I&amp;#39;ve had to reconcile who he became because the between that man who was in the US Army as a medic and the man he became I could never fill that Gap but I forgiven him but then at the same time I&amp;#39;ve had to look at my mother and say she made excuses for him oh he just needs to get it off his chest oh it doesn&amp;#39;t matter just let him say so while on the outside I would say oh yeah my mother loved me but she didn&amp;#39;t protect me so was the was all the stuff that she expressed and and all of the attention and all the the the love that I felt was that because I became successful and I was able to fulfill an emptiness that she&amp;#39;d lived with her whole life with him I don&amp;#39;t know but I I&amp;#39;ve had to ask myself those questions over these last years um to try to reconcile that for myself and the thing you wanted from them and for them is less hate and more love did your dad said he he loves you I I don&amp;#39;t have any memory of that I was in a program and I they were showing us um an experiment that they done with psychologists and mothers and fathers and their children and the children were anywhere between 6 months and a year sitting in a little crib and the exercise was this parents are playing with the baby right there Toys yada y baby&amp;#39;s laughing at and then the psychologist would say stop and the parent would go like this and you would then watch for the next two and a half three minutes this child trying to get their parents&amp;#39; attention in any possible way and I remember when I was sitting in this theater watching this I saw myself that was me screaming and reaching out and trying to get my parents&amp;#39; attention that was me and that was uh not something I I&amp;#39;d ever remembered before but I I knew that what that baby was going through is there some elements of uh politics and maybe the private sector that uh are captured by the by a house of cards like how how true to life do you think that is from everything you&amp;#39;ve seen about politics from everything You&amp;#39; seen about uh the politicians of this particular elections I heard so many different reactions from politicians about House of Cards some would say oh it&amp;#39;s not like that at all and then others would say it&amp;#39;s closer to the truth than anyone wants to admit and I think I fall down in the side of that idea I have to interview some more world leaders some big politicians in your understanding of trying to become Frank hwood what advice would you give in interviewing Frank hwood how do how do get him to say anything that&amp;#39;s at all honest well in Frank&amp;#39;s case all you have to do is tell him to look into the camera and he&amp;#39;ll tell you he&amp;#39;ll tell you what you want to hear secret unfortunately we don&amp;#39;t get that look into the the mind of a person the way we do with Frank Underwood in real life sadly well but you could say to somebody you like the series House of Cards you know I&amp;#39;d love for you to just look into the camera and tell us what&amp;#39;s really going on what you really feel about blah blah blah that&amp;#39;s a good technique I&amp;#39;ll I&amp;#39;ll try that with zalinski and with Putin um what do you hope your legacy as an actor is and and as a human being people ask me now what&amp;#39;s your favorite performance you&amp;#39;ve ever given and my answer is I haven&amp;#39;t given it yet so um there&amp;#39;s a lot more that I want to be challenged by be inspired by um there&amp;#39;s a lot that I don&amp;#39;t know there&amp;#39;s a lot I have to learn um and that is very exciting place to feel that I&amp;#39;m in I you know it&amp;#39;s been interesting because you know we&amp;#39;re we&amp;#39;re going back we&amp;#39;re talking and you know it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s nice to go back every now and then but I&amp;#39;m focused on on what&amp;#39;s next do you hope the world World forgives you people go to church every week to be forgiven and I believe that forgiveness and I believe that Redemption are beautiful things I mean look don&amp;#39;t forget I I live in an industry in which there is a tremendous amount of conversation about Redemption from a lot of people who are very serious people in very serious positions who who believe in it I mean that guy finally got out of prison he was wrongly accused that guy who served his time and got out of prison we see so many people saying let&amp;#39;s find a path for that person Let&amp;#39;s help that person rejoin Society but there is an odd situation if you&amp;#39;re in the entertainment industry you&amp;#39;re not offered that kind of a path and I hope that the fear that people are experiencing will eventually subside and Common Sense will get back to the table if it does do you think you have another Oscar worthy performance in you listen if it would piss off Jack Lemon again for me to win a third time I absolutely think so yeah well you have to mention him again you know Ernest way once said that the world is a fine place and worth fighting for and uh I agree with him on both counts Kevin thank you so much for talking today thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with Kevin spacy to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Merill stre acting is not about being someone different it&amp;#39;s finding the similarity in what is apparently different and then finding myself in there thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

Transcript for:Conversation with Kevin Spacey

Transcript for:
Conversation with Kevin Spacey